


Super Sensitive Summer Slam Splashdown Showdown

by Dreadmartha



Category: Homestuck, Stab Dads - Fandom, The Intermission
Genre: COMPLETE!, Comedy, Humanstuck, M/M, Other, This is basically a Bob's Burgers episode with the cast of Stab Dads, non-canon compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-07
Updated: 2020-01-07
Packaged: 2021-02-27 05:14:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 33,733
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22151602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dreadmartha/pseuds/Dreadmartha
Summary: Spades Slick and Diamonds Droog must complete their sensitivity training or risk losing their Union membership. Meanwhile, Hearts Boxcars, Clubs Deuce and the kids try to beat the heat on the hottest day of summer. Hilarity ensues for both sides of the Crew.Humanstuck, not Homestuck compliant and writing just to have fun.
Relationships: But only as in they're married and have been for nine years, Diamonds Droog/Spades Slick
Comments: 16
Kudos: 39





	1. Breakfast

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't written for this fandom in probably 8 years and it's an odd but delightful treat to be back. I wrote this to beat the winter cold in my apartment and I'm very proud of how funny and sweet it turned out. I owe a thank you to wachtelspinat (https://twitter.com/wachtelspinat) and Christine (https://twitter.com/nokmiet) on twitter for inspiring me to get back into the fandom, and an extremely big thank you to MafagafoGirl (https://archiveofourown.org/users/MafagafoGirl) for being a great resource helping to betaread, sure up the story and add an extra touch of care to the whole narrative. Not sure what story I'll want to tell next with these guys but it's been so much fun getting this story done I'm excited to see what comes to me next.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everyone talks about their plans for the day over scrambled eggs.
> 
> *Boopa has a few translations, but the one I'm most familiar with is 'little girl' or 'pretty girl', used as seen as a nickname for a young lady. Other translations include 'little doll.'

* * *

Parenting had changed the Crew. How could it not, right? Suddenly midnight wasn’t the start of work hours anymore, it was the second time you had to drag yourself out of bed to go feed the baby. It was blinking back at you from the alarm clock, its buddy the baby monitor crying just behind it. It began a half hour or more of swaying and cooing with a swaddled lump in your arms, the lump either cried, peed or threw up before they were ready to curl back up next to the yarn animals Clubs crocheted. 

Not a glamorous life, sure, but neither was being a gangster. None of them minded the lack of glitz... well Droog struggled at first but it passed, and for Hearts there was something so peaceful about 12:57 AM when Tavros finally nodded off. 

He remembered nights from back then, sitting on the floor with his back against the crib reading to the fussy baby in the crook of his arm until Tavros’s little eyes drooped closed and he let out soft, humming breaths. Hearts would stand up, lean over the crib and put him back next to his little pal Ollie the Ox. Turning the light out, he stayed a while to make sure Tavros was truly asleep and while he stood, arms folded over the top of the crib, he’d think about things maybe a little more than he used to. Like, maybe it was better to be a daylight crew, you’d get the nights to spend with the babies. And maybe there’d be more places to rob and extort during the day; they’d never gotten a handle of extortion by running around trying to intimidate closed businesses. Or maybe how they had something else that made all this worth doing now, and Hearts wouldn’t trade a sleepless night watching that crying, ‘fraidy cat lump for one spent running around getting time spliced and shot at. No way in hell. 

He still wouldn’t, nine years later and in the hottest damn summer he could remember in Midnight City. 

That morning he woke up to his beeping alarm clock reminding him that it was six in the morning and already eighty-five degrees out there, folks! Looks like we’re in for a hot one, now here’s Johnny Hartman’s ‘Summertime,’ next up is The Roots with ‘Rolling With Heat!’

He punched the clock and let his fist rest on top of it. The heat had brought him in and out of sleep all night, and in two more seconds he’d peel himself out of bed for sure. Just one more second to rest his eyes. 

In a slow but steady move Hearts sat up and hooked his legs over the side of the bed. Hunching forward he rubbed his dark face, not barely awake and already sweating, and coughed a few dry, rumbling coughs. Clubs had almost completely cut him from smoking but old habits died hard after all, and as long as he didn’t do it in the house or around Tavros he’d sneak a puff here and there. 

He crossed his bedroom, smallish and overstuffed with heavy furniture, clothes, a standing punching bag in the shape of a man’s head and torso, and Heart’s desk which was mostly a place to keep all of Tavros’s drawings now that he’d covered the fridge and the mantel and part of the stairs with them already. Hearts came up to his window down on the street and the little fan that had been chittering all night in front of it. Its little red streamers looked weak and humid as it pushed the hot air around.

Outside the street was quiet and dusky, cars parked and silently baking, a bird sitting on the arm of the powerline watching the sunrise. The street was a royal navy blue, the cars had shadows of a shiny deep indigo and dusty coats of periwinkle and pantone. The buildings up and down the block leaned together, each brownstone and brick showing a different shade of blue that all slowly silvered as the sky lightened overhead. The building across the way stood richer and deeper than the others, blocking out the shy daylight that grew right behind it.

Across the street, Hearts knew, there was a hive of activity as Slick and Droog got the kids up and dressed. This early, and during their summer vacation no less. It made about as much sense as the street looking like they lived underwater when they were really boiling away on the hottest day of summer. But that was life, and they’d all be over soon so Hearts pulled on an undershirt, kept his boxers in lieu of pants and slumped, yawning, into the hallway.

In the bathroom he splashed water on his face and yawned some more into the sink and then into the mirror and then it was time to put a pot of coffee on. 

The pot sat over a burner on the stove, percolating and burbling while Hearts stood with his head leaned inside the freezer. It was a little jarring at first, but that didn’t matter once he felt the icy air on his face and knew this would be the coolest he’d feel all day. Cold air on his face and the rustle of the fridge’s many layers of drawings against his belly were more soothing than he could say.

When he finally pulled himself away, the coffee was done and he set it on an unlit burner to cool. It was time to get breakfast made. Scrambled eggs, bacon, toast, cereal for the kids if they wanted. Hearts made extra this morning, the buttery smell of eggs floating around the kitchen as he fried them with red peppers and leftover mushrooms from Risotto Night. 

As he plated the last slices of toast there was a sharp rapping on the front door, just down the hall, and then the lock turned. 

“Uncle Hearts!” Aradia called, hanging onto the doorknob and stretching her arm out so she could swing on one foot into the hall. “Wake up if you aren’t already!”

“Don’t swing on the doorknob, _boopa*_. You’re going to pull it out.” Droog stepped in after her, pocketing his keys and closing the door softly.

“In here,” Hearts said over his shoulder. “Coffee’s made.”

“Oh thank God,” came the same low voice from the hall. Aradia led them inside with Droog on a direct line to the percolator. He poured a cup before looking at Hearts, only turning when Aradia climbed up to face Hearts across the breakfast bar and started giggling.

“Are those how you got you name, Uncle Hearts?” She asked, pointing to Hearts’s boxers.

“Really, Hearts.” Droog gave him a scowl and Hearts brushed his chin at the old man, spatula in hand. 

“Listen, Miss Priss, we don’t all iron and alphabetize our underwear and that’s just fine. Not everyone is a fussy geezer.” Hearts chided Droog, who had seven years and a lifetime of pickiness on the rest of the Crew. He turned and smiled back at his niece. Almost nine now, she was starting to pick up her father’s sense of style: at six in the morning on the hottest day of summer she was wearing a long pleated black skirt, a black polo shirt, tall black socks, and a long, tight looking fishtail braid held in place by a bulky pink scrunchy. Her father was in a familiar black three piece suit that must be sweltering. 

“Where’s your other half?” Hearts watched Droog drink half his cup in a few gulps before coming up for air.

“Stuck in a loop with Karkat. They’ve been arguing since yesterday, some stupid thing about Karkat’s Gameboy.” Droog shook his head, Aradia shoved him lightly in the side.

“No, Papa, it’s a DS.” She corrected him.

“So it’s the more expensive Gameboy.” Droog squinted at his daughter, not totally sure why there was a distinction at all. She huffed and turned to her uncle, shaking her braided head.

“Yesterday Dad got mad when he started losing at Pokemon and he threw Karkat’s DS down the stairs.”

“Why was he playing Pokeymon?” Droog said in a hiss, tired and affronted. “Why was he playing Pokeymon on the stairs?”

“It’s fun, you’d like it if you ever tried it, Papa. And you’re supposed to, the DS makes it so you can take it anywhere.” Aradia tried but there was no explaining it to her father, and Droog sank back into his cup of coffee unconvinced. “Anyway _you_ wouldn’t break the game when you started losing, but Slick does that kind of thing all the time. He gets so mad he doesn’t even think and then he breaks something!”

Hearts listened to all this, dressing up a plate for Aradia and handing it across the counter with a knife and fork. 

“Thank you,” she said as he brought orange juice, jam and a large but nearly empty bottle of hot sauce from the fridge. Aradia started jamming her toast, pointing it at her father. “Dad won’t apologize and that’s why Karkat won’t forgive him. Didn’t you listen to the speech he gave at dinner last night?”

Droog shrugged and put down his empty mug. 

“He gives a speech at dinner every night, _boopa._ ” He offered her nickname the way he always did when he wanted her to let him off the hook. “Am I supposed to listen _every_ time?”

“You’re really primed for class today, huh Diamonds? Sensitivity training look out!” Hearts laughed and handed Droog a full plate and silverware. Droog scowled and snatched up the hot sauce, grinding his teeth disdainfully. The silver rings he wore on all four fingers chimed loudly off the neck of the bottle.

“Sensitivity training is ridiculous,” he said, hitting his eggs hard with the hot sauce. “If there was any sense to it we would have passed three times already.”

“Yeah, funny how Clubs and me got through it,” Hearts snapped his fingers. “Right off the bat. Aced it. Y’know you just have to listen to Moose--”

“I know about Moose.” Droog said in a hurry, jabbing at his food. “I know he’s an idiot. The whole Organized Criminals’ Union, they’re all idiots.”

“You’re gonna do great today, Papa.” Aradia smiled at him from behind her hand as she chewed.

“Eat your eggs.” Droog told her.

From the living room Hearts heard footsteps and a moment later Tavros was sitting next to Aradia at the breakfast bar, arms bent in front of him into a pillow for his blonde head. He closed his eyes and muttered “Good morning,” into his elbow. He had on a pair of socks and was swimming in an old t-shirt of Hearts’s with Betty Boop on it. Droog was wearing a new scowl.

“Does this whole house only wear their underwear?” 

“You wear full pajamas in this weather, Droog? You’re that kind of cold blooded?” 

“Of course… not.” Droog was watching Hearts’s face carefully. “I got dressed when I got up, is that so hard?”

“You really are going to do great in sensitivity class.” Hearts nodded and scooped up the last scrambles of his eggs with the corner of a piece of toast. He then piled Tavros’s plate together, setting it down next to him and ruffling his hair. “Wakey wakey, kiddo.”

“Eggs and bakey,” Tavros poked an eye open.

Droog grumbled and went for a second cup of coffee. There was the sound of voices at the front door before it clattered open and slammed shut. 

“And what I’m telling you is I don’t give a fuck about what you say because you don’t give a fuck about what I have to say!” Karkat was coming in hot; spit speckling from his braces as he rattled on and on.

“What the _fuck,_ kid! Watch your fucking language!” And Slick was burning up right beside him. The two of them hustled into the kitchen, fighting to get through the door first until Slick elbowed his way through. 

“Jesus!” Karkat rubbed his side, looking more hurt than he was. “You know you’re such a fucking dick!”

“What’d I just say?” Slick shot back.

“Whatever, it doesn’t even matter it’s fucking so stupid.” Karkat shoved his hands in his armpits and joined the other kids at the breakfast bar. Tavros had propped his head up on his arm, rudely awoken by all the shouting. 

“G’morning boys,” Hearts told them both, setting them up with breakfast. Karkat grumbled and picked up his fork, turned pointedly away from his dad. Slick paced back and forth, shaking his head sharply when Hearts offered him food. 

“I’m not hungry,” he said, body bent forward with his arms at right angles, hands in his pockets. Hearts knew this look, whenever Slick got over-aggravated he got extra pointy. Food wouldn’t do much to help him, more than anything Slick ran on his own perpetual anger anyhow. “Fuck! I don’t believe this day. Droog, we’re leaving right now, we’re getting this shit over with once and for all. We’re gonna kill this fucking sensitiviy training bullshit!”

“We’re not leaving until my third cup.” Droog droned, rubbing his temples with one ringed hand. Arabia got him a warm up and he drank it gratefully, petting her long black hair. “Thank you, _boopa_.”

“Hey boys!” A piping voice came from the hall. Clubs had come in from the other side of the duplex he and Hearts shared. He was followed closely by Sollux, who looked deeply hypnotized by the 3DS in his hands. “What’s all the rumpus?” 

“S’hot as balls and we have to go see Moose fucking Lozano,” Slick’s mismatched hands, one weather beaten and brown and the other shiny and chrome, waved in front of him. 

“Ohho, yeah, you two are in for it huh? Sensitivity training better look out.” Clubs helped himself and Sollux to breakfast, Sollux sat with his 3DS screen reflecting off his glasses and muttered a hypnotized hello to everyone. 

“Don’t remind me,” Slick went back to pacing.

“I hate to say it, Uncle Hearts,” Aradia started, looking at her Uncle Clubs, dressed in undershirt, pants and suspenders. “But I think you two might really be underdressed.”

Tavros picked his head up and looked around, then between his Betty Boop shirt and his father’s undershirt and St. Christopher necklace. 

“Really? It’s so early though…” He mumbled.

“You all come over to my house, _my house_ , and tell me and Tavros how we’re supposed to dress while I make you a nice breakfast? In _my house?_ We get to dress how we want here because it’s our side of the building, alright?” Hearts shook his head incredulously, thumping his finger against the countertop to make his point. 

“Who cares what you’re fucking wearing? Your dick’s not out so what’s the problem?” Slick stopped stalking up and down the kitchen to squint at them. 

“Who _cares_?” Droog asked, eyeing Slick over the rim of his mug. 

“Oh, sowwy, I forgot about the fashionista we have here.” Slick went bug-eyed and waggled his head at Droog, bony shoulders up at his ears, hands open wide. “Everyone shut up and let’s hear Diamonds’s opinion now, huh?”

“Take the air.” Droog growled at him. He pointed to the front door with his mug. “I’ll be out to deal with you in a minute.” 

“Finally! Jesus fucking Chirst!” Slick turned and stomped down the hall, bony legs swinging wide apart with his needley shoulders leading him out into the street. 

“Bye-yah!” Karkat picked his head up and yelled after Slick, just before he slammed out the door. Droog gurgled down the last of his coffee. 

“Man, you guys are going to flunk so hard today.” Clubs told him, shaking his head and smiling. “Hey Hearts do you think Moose can get us a tape of today’s class even if we lose our Union membership? It’s gonna be one for the books.”  
Hearts held up his crossed fingers. 

“If we lose our Union membership because of you two it better make a good movie.” He told Droog. The old man didn’t respond, only set down his mug, stood from the breakfast bar and adjusted his suit and tie. The small diamond tie pin that held the knot together glinted under his hand.

“We’ll see what we have to do to sew this up.” He said, dreading it already. “If the Organized Criminals’ Union won’t take a bribe I’ll eat my hat.”

“No no, think sensitively,” Clubs held up a stubby finger at him. “Give them a stern, heart-felt talking to, they’ll understand. Just be vulnerable.”

Droog sighed out some of his immortal soul, then shook it off. He put his arm out to Aradia and they side hugged, Droog pecked the top of her head. Karkat was turned away from him, morosely poking his bacon with his fork. Droog touched his fingers to his lips and then tapped them to Karkat’s cheek as he stepped passed his son towards the door. “You two be good.”

He paced down the hall and was gone.

Aradia held her breath until she heard the town car start up and pull away from the curb outside. She let it out in a heavy sigh, throwing her head back and shaking out her crazy hair, the fat scrunchy holding her braid together going to her wrist. She untucked her shirt, pulled off her pleated skirt to reveal a pair of black gym shorts underneath, and kicked the skirt across the kitchen.

“All morning with you and now you’re throwing your clothes around my house, Aradia?” Hearts got her immediately.

“It’s too hot for that stuff! And Papa won’t let me wear my shorts out so I had to double up.” She insisted, then turned on Karkat. “How long are you and Dad going to keep fighting? You were yelling at each other all night last night and you’re still not done?”

“It’s whatever, it’s like totally fine, I don’t even care that he’s such a dick and he only ever gets mad and breaks stuff and wants everyone to be fine with it.” Karkat said, his breakfast now cold while he faced away from Sollux’s 3DS. 

“Your dads are just stressed out with work,” Clubs told them both. “Once they get their sensitivity training figured out he’ll cool off a little. Back to his usual self.”  
“Yeah, ‘cause that’s so cool all the time. Exactly how we like him.” Karkat groaned and covered one side of his face with his arm, his hand tugging lightly at his own hair. 

Hearts was leaned heavily against the countertop now, nursing his second cup of coffee. 

“Hey, c’mon.” He put his hand in Karkat’s hair, almost covering his whole head. “You’re taking a break from each other today, right? Try to kick back, forget about him.”

Karkat sighed dramatically and stilled for a second, then nodded and sat up. He started in on his breakfast like it was the first time he’d noticed it all morning.

“It’s good eggs, Hearts.” Clubs had already polished off his breakfast, and went down the counter collecting everyone’s empty plates. “Sollux put that thing down and eat already, your cereal’s soggy.”  
“‘Kay.” Sollux put his 3DS aside and started eating with gusto so he could get back to his game.

Clubs shook his head and sighed. “I swear those things must be some kind of brain parasite. Beams it right in through your eyeballs till you can’t get it back out.” 

He brought the dishes to the sink and started washing them. 

“Hey, ixnay on the ames-gay,” Hearts nodded to Karkat who was back to looking forlornly at Sollux’s discarded console. “We’re forgetting about those too today.”  
“Really?” Sollux looked up from his cereal bowl. “But it’s summer, what else are we supposed to do?”

Hearts looked baffled. “What do you mean what else are you supposed to do? You’re kids and it’s summertime. You’re supposed to go ride bikes and play stick-ball in the street.” 

“Nooo, c’mon it’s boiling outside.” Aradia shook her head, hair forming a wild black cloud around her brown face. She started pulling her hair into a huge puff with the scrunchy. 

“Yeah, we shouldn’t go out unless you’re gonna teach us to fry eggs on the sidewalk again.” Tavros was leaning with his arms folded on the countertop, remembering the hottest day of last year’s summer.

“Alright, you lazies. But we’re not sticking our faces in Gameboys all day. It’ll be good for you guys, a little moderation.”

Sollux stuck his tongue out and blew a raspberry at his uncle, but closed the 3DS and left it on the counter.

“We’re still doing Tall Boys and Hard Boys, right Hearts?” Clubs looked up from the sink, elbow deep in soapy water. They’d taped the latest pay-per-view wrestling match and saved it for their day off today, along with a few sixers of Coors.

“Yeah, sure of course.” Hearts knocked on the counter. “You guys want to watch wrestling, right?”

“Yes!” Tavros was bright eyed. Knowing the fighting was ‘fake’ helped him enjoy watching for the buoyant storytelling and the pure pageantry of professional wrestling. Sollux hummed and leaned his chin in his hand. Like the rest of the duplex, the love of wrestling had gotten him too, though he was more interested in the big events than the weekly minutiae of R’KO’s, brawls and bodyslams. 

“Is it just Raw or did you get the pay-per-view?”

“Pay-per-view buddy.” Clubs snapped his soapy fingers, sending a few bubbles to his boy. 

“In.” Sollux nodded and clapped his hand on the countertop.

“What’s the big deal about wrestling?” Aradia finally muscled her wild hair into the scrunchy and was watching the others get excited over something her father assured her was very stupid and never even real. It always made her wonder why they made so much hay out of something that apparently didn’t even happen. 

“Oh, Aradia, you are in for a treat.” Hearts told her. “Forget everything your father said about it, he doesn’t know what fun is.”

Aradia snorted, folding her hands on the table. “Okey sure, if you say so.”

Really, she thought their cutthroat Scrabble games were the height of fun but that was also because she could make Droog turn four different colors in one match now that she had all her archeology books to pull words from. But she was willing to come down to wrestling’s level, especially if it could impress her cousins who had such polar taste.

Karkat was picking at the edge of the countertop not really listening to the others. “It’s not even that good, it’s like so dumb. Just fighting because you can, s’stupid.”

“Oh, don’t say that,” Clubs piped as he rinsed off the last plate. “Has Slick showed you any? He’s a real hooligan if you take him to a local match, just Droog never lets him out for them these days.”

Karkat shook his head, munching on the last of his bacon and handing his uncle his empty plate. “Dad’s into wrestling too?”

“Sure, of course he is. Anyone with a heart would be.” Hearts assured his nephew, then put up a hand. “And anyway, how do you know it’s dumb if you never watched any?”

Karkat shrugged, having to mull that one over. 

“Why not give it a try?” Hearts kept angling for him. “Then you can decide just how stupid it is.” 

“Yeah, and knowing how dumb something is adds another point to how smart you are.” Clubs agreed. They could tell they’d sold Karkat, who was humming and trying to calculate just how smart he’d be if he added a few extra points today. They exchanged smiles and Clubs pulled the stopper from the sink, letting the soapy water swirl the last of breakfast down the drain.


	2. Class

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Slick and Droog make it to the Organized Criminals' Union in time for class and meet their classmates for the pen-ultimate sensitivity training seminar.

* * *

It was time to shut up and hear Droog’s opinion on the way to the Organized Criminals’ Union, but Slick had seen that coming. And, really, being married to Droog for nine years made him easy to tune out. 

He didn’t have anything to say that Slick didn’t already know. His fight with Karkat was stupid and they should be done with it already, they’d robbed the old man of his beauty sleep last night and if Slick would just stop being pig-headed this could all be over with. The whole thing was his fault, anyway, if Slick would just fix things instead of making this everyone else’s problem.

Slick knew the wrong thing to say as they pulled into the three story cement garage that adjoined to the OCU’s building, so he said it. “Jesus, Droog, I didn’t know you were such a feeler. You oughta work here with Moose, you’re both such delicate, _sensitive_ flowers.”

Droog split his tirade off at the ankles to suck in and snarl out a breath. He pulled them into a parking spot and and killed the engine and flicked his cigarette butt out the window. 

“Don’t even joke,” A chill went through Droog’s narrow, shouldersy frame, down his long arms to the leather steering wheel. The old man, or maybe his old ‘84 Fifth Avenue, made a loose rattling sound. 

“Keep it together, Delicates Droog. It’s a eight hour fucking seminar.” Slick knocked Droog’s arm loose from the wheel, squeezing his bicep some before he climbed out of the car. Droog followed him out, fishing in his jacket for his cigarettes and then poking a fresh one between his lips. They walked down the sloped asiles of parking spaces to the ticket returns and the sliding glass door into the OCU building proper. The traffic rolled by, up a small ramp to the street outside. Slick imitated picking his teeth so he could chew his nails, kicking dirt and looking away from the glass door. Droog pretended to see something out through the front of the garage, the shining bodies of cars and two floors of beaming office windows stared back harshly, heat whispering off the black street.

“Y’know what we oughta do?” Slick finally folded his sinewy arms over his chest and turned slowly on his heel to Droog. His husband hummed and raised his black eyebrows. “We already know the problem is Moose, so why not…” 

Slick shrugged, pushing his pointy shoulders up high and then slumping them back down. He pursed his rat lips and rolled both hands over and over until his one fist connected solidly with the other palm. His eye closed and he flicked his chin, good riddance. 

“You can dream,” Droog spoke into his lighter, pocketed it and watched his smoke drift emptyingly towards the sliding glass door. “We’d never get the body out of here. When was the last time you carried a moose?” 

“So we do it somewhere else, how hard can that be?” 

Droog shook his greying head.

“It’s not worth losing our membership. And that kind of scheme comes back to bite you sooner than later.” He covered his mouth with his hand, cigarette sitting between two ringed fingers. Without meaning to, Droog had touched on the one thing that had kept them coming back every time they failed their sensitivity training. Their fantasy of removing Moose fizzled in the humid air of the garage. Slick rubbed his head with his metal hand, flinching at how hot his own hand had gotten in the car. 

“A’right, c’mon. It’s cooler inside at least.” Slick shrugged his tiny jacket straight on his shoulders and led them into the OCU. 

The building was a relic from the turn of the last century, half a block of greystone with small, round windows dotting the facade. They had missed the chance to come in the front, where the building’s mezzanine was held up on the backs of two giant stone gangsters who framed the gold trimmed revolving doors. Instead, they followed a hallway that showed off the recent interior renovation, from stone halls and marble floors to beige wall tiles, painted stucco and drop ceilings. The one part of the Organized Criminals’ Union that retained its old charm was the front lobby, where a large oblong desk with a black marble top and a belt of filament lights sat back from the door. The mezzanine windows shone brightly down on a jagged sunburst of black, green and red marble polished into the marble floor. The center of the sunburst was a copper medallion about six feet across with the Union’s motto ‘Faber est suae quisque fortunae.’ Every man is the artisan of his own fortune. The motto etched in a ring around an embossment of a bundle of olive branches being held together by an opposing pair of hands. 

Coming from the side hall, they saw the redheaded receptionist who was waiting behind the front desk, loudly chewing gum. She wore a black blouse and dangling jade earrings, and at the sight of Slick she reached down under her desk and pulled out a large plastic tub. A strip of masking tape on its side read simply: Weapons. 

“Let’s have them.” The receptionist, Alice, dumped the plastic bin on top of her desk and put her chin in her hand, blowing bubbles while Slick started pulling all the knives from inside his coat. On the desk in front of her was a computer, a typewriter, a page a day calendar, a large green glass ashtray and a mug holding several pink, feathery topped pens. Slick started filling the plastic tub, while Droog deposited his .45, knife and penknife. He stood back and waited while Slick pulled knife after knife, varying shapes and sizes, from his pockets. When he was finally done Alice had already checked them in and Droog was turning the ashtray on the desk into his private zen garden. When he thought he was done Droog knocked on his ankle with the toe of his shoe.

“Your bird’s beak.” He said, looking down at Slick’s scrawny ankle and the sheath hidden in his sock. Slick grumbled and added the short, curved knife to the bin.

“Thank you,” Alice said laboriously with her gum tucked in her cheek, jotting their names on the side of the bin and then hefting it under her desk again. “So you two know what I’m about to say so let’s get it over with fast. You both recognize that the Union building is neutral territory in any ongoing turf wars, power struggles, and organized feuding you might have going on.” 

“Yes,” they both groaned. 

“And any unsanctioned criminal activity done here against a rival or the Union itself is punishable by expulsion,” she blew a bubble with her gum, popped it and continued while she chewed, “for an indefinite period until all dues, vengeances or vendettas are paid in full. As well as all damages and fines accrued in the attack.”  
“Yes,” they toned again. Droog squared his shoulders and said. “You can’t just have us sign a waiver for this, Alice? We have to do it every time?” 

“Every time.” Alice thumbed to the security camera focused on them behind her. “So smile for the camera, boys. Your word is bond here, yahdah yahdah.” 

She handed them a pair of lanyards with featureless plastic passes at the ends that read ‘TRAINEE.’ 

“Moose is in the usual room.” She told them as they begrudgingly put on their lanyards. “Try not to blow this one, huh? If you can’t make it through it’ll be Fran’s class or your gang’s out on your asses.”

“Nobody’s going to Fran’s class,” Slick put some steel behind his voice because he didn’t like to think about Fran’s class. He’d met guys who dropped out of all of Moose’s class and had to take the final stop-gap measure to ensure the Union trained each and every member all about pluralism and sensitivity. They were changed men, hollow and cagey and extremely socially aware. Every once in a while you’d see one shuffling along the halls of the OCU, muttering to themselves about wage gaps or systematic racism or the price you paid to your fellow man to make sure the crime you did was the best it could be. “We’ll get Moose to pass us this time and that’s that.”

“I’ll tell Fran she doesn’t need that new set of eyelid clamps she picked out for you, Slick.” Alice snorted. “Y’know she was pretty excited about them.”

Slick gave her a sour scowl and tugged Droog around the desk with him towards the elevators. They could hear Alice laughing to herself as they walked off.

“You don’t think that’s true,” Slick turned his head so he could see Droog, who was turning more and more statue-like the closer they came to class. “The eye-ball-clamp stuff?”

Droog pursed his lips and blew out a breath, shrugging. 

“We use the same clamp wholesaler, it sounds like she buys more than her share.” He admitted. Slick looked grim and Droog continued. “But the eyelid clamps come as a full facial array, so it wouldn’t even work on you. They don’t make one sided eyelid clamps.” 

That didn’t do a lot for Slick but he nodded and forced himself to stand with his hands in his pockets, rather than wrapping himself up in a hug and looking scared. The elevator doors opened and they rode up. 

“But we got it this time,” Slick said, maybe to Droog or himself. “We heard it all three times already, of course it’s gonna take now. Fourth times the charm.”

“Sure.” Droog was slump shouldered and grey. Probably the lack of sleep, that kind of thing wore on him more than it used to. Slick shouldn’t have kept him up before a day like today.

But Droog was just an old fogey; that shouldn’t be Slick’s problem.

“So what’s your plan for today?” Slick said, sniffing loudly as he acted collected and normal. “Like to get through class, I mean.”

Droog’s tongue poked at the inside of his cheek as he stepped out of the elevator with Slick. 

“I’m figuring how we could move Moose out of here,” he said, petting his brown chin as they walked down the hall towards class. “If we had a gurney maybe. Get him hurt, take him to the ambulance, finish up and dump the car.” 

“It’s a good start,” Slick scratched his stubble and turned the thought around in his own head. “Stealing a ambulance might be tricky.”

“I know a guy who keeps one off the books.” Droog told him, stopping outside of class and not going near the door. 

“You know a guy who has a ambulance just, for himself? To drive around being a fake ambulance?” Slick knew more about Droog than anyone else and he could still be surprised by his intricate social network of anti-social creeps.

“Yeah, he picks up hurt people on the side of the road and takes them--” 

“Stop, stop, I can’t think about this right before I have to see that fatass or I might let you go through with it.” Slick put up his hands, his face pinching together in something like disgust. 

“Go through with what now?” The door to class opened and Moose Lozano looked out at them. 

He was not quite as wide across as an armored truck, and just a little shorter. You had to be a big guy, trying to teach sensitivity to a bunch of mobsters. Moose had a broad, sweet face that was mostly cheeks and laugh lines, with a mop of thick, curly black hair and a ruddy complexion. Like any good organized criminal he had a busted pug nose and quick glinting black eyes, but also a softness to he demeanor that made him easy to talk to. He wore a grey tweed suit with white golf balls for buttons.

“I think you two are about to be late for class.” He stepped back from the doorway, leaving room for Slick and Droog to come through. They both slinked in, taking seats in the three by three grid of desks in the pressboard box that was Moose’s classroom. Slick sat on the far side in the middle of the three rows, where he could see the clock better than the white board with Moose’s name on it. Droog sat next to him, incidentally dead middle of class. He lit up and started puffing quietly, building up a cloud of smoke he’d feel right at home in while they suffered through class.

Moose stood by the door, looking into the hall and standing with his big arms hanging loosely from his shoulder. He looked chipper in a practiced sort of way, a face he was putting on to create the best environment for his students. His big, warm voice addressed them while he watched the hall. “You’re gonna do fine today, boys. Don’t get down on yourselves, you keep coming back and I’m already proud of youse for that.”

Slick and Droog shared a look and another few seconds of their fantasy of killing Moose and mulching his body for Droog’s spice garden. Slick wondered if Droog had ambulance guy’s number saved in his phone.

“Who’re you waiting for?” Slick asked pointedly, watching Moose watching the hall. He craned his neck to try and see without having to straighten up in his seat. “We’re here now aren’t we?”

Moose cast a look over at his desk in the front of class, where a briefcase’s worth a paperwork, his clutch with pens and pencils and a bottle of hand sanitizer were laid out. He had a clicker for the overhead projector, and somewhere in the mix of papers he had his lesson plan. There was also a stack of folders holding the Union’s records of Slick, Droog, and five other classmates, as well as a red airhorn sitting on top of the stack. 

“Well, you boys failed your written test three times now, and I know tests aren’t the best way to handle education necessarily, so we’re doing something different today.” Slick felt a chill of paranoia run up his little spine and he slapped both hands on either side of his desk, angling up to see into the hall. “I didn’t want to start on this foot but today’s gonna get you boys in gear. It’ll have to.”

“What do you mean different?” Droog asked, red eyes peering out of his privacy cloud. Talking opened up a hole in his cloud that he quickly puffed shut again. 

“See, this class is all about cooperation, right? You and your team, your team and society. It’s not something mobsters are naturals at, believe me,” Moose chuckled to himself and Slick and Droog shared another look, Slick’s eye wide and Droog looking grimly through his veil of smoke. Moose turned his rosy face back to them. “You two checked your weapons with Alice, right?”

“What the fuck is this?” Slick squinted, seeing better with one eye than Droog could through his privacy cloud. “Why?”

“You checked everything?” Moose said over the sound of several sets of footsteps coming down the hall. “Like everything, everything?”

“What is this, Moose?” Slick demanded.

Moose stepped back from the door again and in it Slick saw a mess of green bodies, enough to make his tiny stomach turn. Everything that happened next took a matter of seconds:

Itchy, Doze, Die, Crowbar, and Quarters were looking in at them, Crowbar fully through the door. He put his arms out and gripped the doorframe, long face a pale mask of surprise.

“Boys!” He shouted over his shoulder, just as Slick threw out an arm and slapped Droog across the nipples, then tried to launch himself over the plastic slab of his desk and took its corner right in the crotch.

“God damn bitch!” Slick grabbed the desk and kicked out from inside it, sending it clattering to the floor as he grabbed his beans.

Quarters took Crowbar’s shoulder and forced him out of the way, bouncing him off the whiteboard. He stormed, shoulders first for Droog, who swung out from under his desk with a long, loud creak from his knees. There was a green blur angling on the outside of the room for Slick, only to get tangled with his crashed over desk. Slick grabbed in his coat and found nothing, then ducked for his ankle and only found his empty sock. God damn Alice and her box of his knives!

He stayed low, getting a blurry glimpse of Itchy’s little rat face. Droog’s shadow moved behind him and Quarters’s fist swung down just passed it, clattering over another desk. Crowbar hissed and smeared red dry erase marker from his cheek, Die shuffled in his coat and came up empty, Doze blinked slowly from where he was standing in the hall. Itchy lunged for Slick who threw a metal punch straight for his ugly little mug, Quarters took a ‘one, two’ in the body from Droog like it was nothing and Droog tried to dance back in the narrow space to come up with a better plan than punching a brick wall.

Moose stepped behind his desk, cupped a hand over one ear and picked up the airhorn that sat on top of his stack of papers. He blew it right over the brawl that was destroying his classroom, holding it aloft and blaring until everyone froze and turned to him. 

“Okey, so we all know each other, don’t we?” Moose kept the airhorn up even as it fell silent, just in case they all needed another jarring blast. “That’s good. Now guess what, every single one of youse failed your sensitivity training for exactly this reason. So if you want to fail today and go take class with Ms. Fran you can go right ahead.”  
Everyone was tense and still, Slick and Droog still eyeing Quarters and Itchy respectively. Crowbar, ever the mouthpiece, puffed up his wide shoulders and smoothed red marker back into his hair.

“We’re okey, aren’t we boys?” He shot a look around. “Quarters, we’re alright, right?”

Quarters huffed, hunched towards Droog still keen for a fight. He gave a heavy shake of his head and loosened his shoulders, easing back on his heels. “Yeah, sure.”

“It’s just funny how you took one in the beans _and_ busted your desk.” Itchy said rapidly, finally disentangling himself from Slick’s desk.

“They’re fine, they’re made of steel!” Slick kicked into the seat and sent the desk right into Itchy’s ankles, knocking him back over. 

“Hey! Hey! You can’t do that!” Crowbar shouted and pointed, just as Moose gave Slick another shriek from the airhorn.

“That’s enough!” Moose opened up the way a big guy could, pulling his voice up from the soles of his feet and booming out like an angry bear. “I’m not saying it again. I use this one more time everyone fails right now.”  
He looked around the room and found the two crews frozen. Slick and Itchy were still snarling at each other but neither made a move. Crowbar was making eyes at the other Felts, but mostly muttering to himself distastefully. Die looked squeamish, fighting without temporal or magical help was not his strong suit, and Doze finally made it over the threshold into the classroom. Droog was the first to break the freeze, sighing through his nose and picking his desk back up. Moving very deliberately, he sat back down, smoothed out his tie, took the cigarette from his mouth and threw it on the ground. He squashed it out with the toe of his shoe.

Slick hissed out a breath and snatched at his desk, having to drag it up off of Itchy. Crowbar came around the rows of desks and took a seat in the back row, right behind Slick. Quarters sat behind Droog, Die shuffling to the empty chair at the end of the back row. Itchy grumbled and flashed over to the back row’s last seat, snatching it from Die who had to bump up a row and sit next to Droog. Doze was pointed vaguely towards the front row.

“Okey.” Moose still had a hard look on his face as he loomed over his desk, but he put the airhorn down with its mouth turned on the class. “Since you all flunked the other seminars we’re giving you a new challenge. All of you are here on neutral territory, unarmed, in class with your registered feud partners to see if you can pass together as a class.” 

There was a rumble around the room that Moose ignored to address Doze. 

“And Doze I know you physically can’t move faster than this so you can start taking your final test right now.” He pulled a blank three page test from his briefcase and put it on a desk in the front row. “Today’s seminar will be eight hours, so you should have plenty of time to finish.”

Doze looked like he might start thinking about saying something about that when he finally made it the last five feet to his desk. 

“This is ridiculous!” Crowbar announced from the back. He’d tried to get a leg up and bent over his desk to make himself look detached from the classroom experience but instead he was just oddly stuck with his thigh pressed tightly to his ribs by his desk. “How’re we supposed to pass with these clowns when we couldn’t do it by ourselves?”

“To be clear,” Moose held up a big hand. “The rest of you won’t be given a written test. Today I’m judging you on whether or not you can apply enough of the principles we’ve covered in training already to make a genuine effort with one another. If having your rivals here makes it impossible for you to be receptive and responsible you can take a fail today and try this Ms. Fran’s way.” 

No one had anything to say about that. 

“So no takers?” Moose asked the room, more of his cool, pleasant manner coming back. “Good then. Let’s get started.”

He pulled down a white projection screen that was furled over the white board, picked up the small black remote from his desk, and clicked on the overhead projector. A familiar PowerPoint opened on the screen with his introductory slide, reading: 

  
**Sensitivity and Youse**

How to kill ‘em better with kindness.

At the bottom of the slide were two clipart images, one of a gangster sweetly consoling his friend as he lay bleeding out and the second of a gunman in hat and coat firing heart shaped bullets into a cartoon stoolie. 

Moose turned out the overhead light and started skimming through the parts of the PowerPoint they’d all seen three times by now. In the dark Slick glanced over at Droog, who’d come out from behind his cloud to look him. They shared a second of silent commiseration. Slick mouthed ‘stoopid,’ and Droog rolled his eyes and spread the fingers of one hand skyward, his many rings reflecting the pallorous light of the projector. Slick hunched back in his seat and smirked. 

“So thank God you’ve all passed your race, gender, and queer consciousness portions. I have to say I’m glad we aren’t stuck there, you’d be surprised how hard that is for some people.”

From the back of the class Itchy blew a raspberry that sounded like a hornet buzzing.

“How’re we still doing this, we all know about colorism within marginalized communities and what not to call people and that gender is a spectrum and that intersectionality is key to uplifting one another.” 

“Yeah.” Quarters added heavily. 

“And women have it worse, that’s why you don’t see Snowy here.” Crowbar looked down the row at his boys, assuring them not only that he knew Snowman but that he was bold enough to use her nickname outside of the manor. “Women have to play this game all the time, us guys have it easy.”

“We’ve all taken Women’s Studies, Crowbar.” Droog spoke belligerently at the screen. “Shut up already.”

“Lots of love in this room,” Moose chuckled to himself and flipped through the first portion of his PowerPoint. The second half was the meat and potatoes these goons kept flunking out on. Sure, they knew a good helping of what sensitivity training was about but they were stuck unable to actualize it. 

“So thanks to the fact that you’re all roughly socially sensible we’re focusing on the other branch of sensitivity training today which is…” Moose gave a pregnant pause on a slide that simply read: 

And the next step is…!

A collective sigh spread around the room and everyone chimed up laboriously. 

“Behavioral flexibility.” 

Slick grumbled along with everyone else, watching Droog’s smokescreen to see him droning along as well.

“That’s right, ‘behavioral flexibility.’” Moose read off his next slide. “Now let’s break that down into our four easy steps.” 

The next slide opened to the one Slick was loath to admit he’d memorized. It was hard not to remember something you were failing at. 

What makes up ‘behavioral flexibility?’

 **Self-Awareness:** Perceiving your own emotions and actions in the moment.

 **Self-Management:** What happens when you act or do not act. Being aware of how your emotions direct your behavior.

 **Social Awareness:** Perceiving what others are thinking and feeling. Listening and observing are key skills.

 **Social Skill:** Managing interactions with others, relationship management and handling conflict. Noting the impact of stress on relationships. 

Moose laid the steps out with a little more panache as the class read what was now old news. “#1. Can you take account of yourself? #2. Can you act in your own best interest? #3. Can you tune in to other people and what they need? Those last two we’re gonna find out about today huh?” 

Slick grunted in agreement, casting a look over his shoulder at the green shadows behind him. He watched Crowbar finally managed to get his leg unstuck from its position on the inside crook of his desk. Sitting like that had him looking more blue than green, but he was finally able to breathe normally now. Slick snorted and shone his jagged teeth at Crowbar. 

“And #4. Can you make the best decisions for the relationships that matter? It sounds simple but this is the big one, boys.” Moose finished.  
“What’s so funny?” Crowbar huffed, yanking on his lapels to straighten out his jacket while he rasped quietly for breath. 

“Was just thinking you look good in blue,” Slick wagged his chin at Crowbar. “But y’know I like you a lot better in red.” 

“You wanna make something of it?” Crowbar hunched over his desk to get closer to Slick’s face. 

“Boys.” Moose said sternly from the front of the class. He had his finger on the button of the airhorn, ready to sound it if either of them had one more thing to say. They shut up and Moose took his hand away. 

“We’ll start with self awareness.” Moose flipped to his next slide.

**Activity 1**

**Self-Awareness:** Perceiving your own emotions and actions in the moment.

Participants will use an accounting of the self to workshop their criminal declarations. 

Moose continued: “I want you boys to play to your strengths here, this is the Organized Criminals’ Union after all. Everyone’s gonna deliver me one complex threat with plenty of true ‘I’ statements. Slick, since you’re feeling chatty you can go first.” 

“Ahh, okey… uh…” Slick put his hands on his desk and pulled himself up so he was sitting straight instead of slumping so his feet could touch the floor. Behind him there was a quiet, nasty laugh and he sucked a breath through his teeth to ignore it. “I’m Spades Slick, I run Midnight City and I didn’t get my eye stabbed out or my arm ripped off for anybody to tell me different. I _account for myself_ ,” He boggled his head and leered directly at Moose, who looked back cool and indifferent. “And I make sure anybody who crosses me is gonna end up in a bucket of pig’s slop.”

“That’s good, next time let’s hear more about the eye and the arm. Don’t be afraid of being vulnerable.” Moose told him. Slick groaned and rubbed his good eye with his good hand. “Crowbar, you’re up Chuckles.”

“I’m Crowbar, _I_ run Midnight City. And I make sure anybody dumb enough to think otherwise loses life and limb--s.” He kicked out his leg and rattled the back of Slick’s seat. 

Slick took the bait, hooking sideways out of his seat this time and turning on Crowbar. Crowbar hurried to his feet. 

“You wanna do this, shitty Kermit the Frog?” Slick spat. “You want it to be a whole lot harder being green?!”

“Slick, sit down!” Moose bellowed from the front.

“C’mon, short stack. I’ll give you something to account for.” Crowbar squared up, Quarters and Itchy starting to steel themselves for another brawl or the airhorn or both. 

“Say it again.” Slick growled, staring Crowbar down as soon as the word ‘short’ was in his mouth.

“You’re so short Droog had to drive you here ‘cause you couldn’t reach the pedals. You’re a half pint and you’re mad that you sound like Lil Jon yet you can’t sing.” 

“Yeah?!” Slick went wide eyed.

“Yeah!” 

“Okey! Account for this, Kermit!” Slick ducked and got in close, clamped his metal hand around Crowbar’s throat, put the other hand behind his back and then threw the two of them to the ground with his body weight aimed at pinning Crowbar.


	3. Wrestling

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hearts and Clubs introduce their niece and nephew to professional wrestling. I haven't kept up with pro-wrestling since the networks split some years ago so my opinions, while correct, are technically out of date.  
> This is the chapter where I reference Homer, you're welcome.

* * *

“You never heard of a chokeslam?” Hearts didn’t believe it. Now showered, shaved, and dressed almost identically to Clubs but for the suspender straps unslung and hanging from his waist; Hearts stared at Aradia who sat staring wild eyed at the TV. 

She had just seen her very first chokeslam, delivered by the beastly Bray Wyatt to Roman Reigns. Reigns, long haired and robust in all black with an armful of traditional Samoan tattoos, looked like Scar from the Lion King as a human linebacker. He was apparently a good guy, a ‘face’ Clubs had called it, and took a chokeslam very well. 

Above him the mountain of hillbilly that was Bray Wyatt, a villainous ‘heel,’ was gloating and riling up the crowd. Despite him being a greasy, Deliverance-style backwater cult leader the crowd loved his antics and the announcers hollered over them, declaring what a hit it was and what could poor Roman Reigns do? Roman stayed on the mat, rolling back in forth in mock pain and shock as Bray got in his audience time. 

Aradia bounced off of the boxy brown plaid couch and plopped onto the thick, red plaid shag carpet that stretched from the couch to the wood framed TV. Sollux and Tavros lay on either side of the rug on the cool hardwood floor, while Clubs and Hearts sat in a pair of red, black and brown plaid, overstuffed recliners. The two chairs were identical but for the body sized indentations left on the cushions.

They were all parked in Hearts’s living room. The whole room, somehow, was one kind of plaid or another. The couch where Karkat was curled glumly against the lumpy cushions, the two recliners, the wine-dark sea of shag carpet, even the paneling on the TV made the same grid as the floorboards. There was a wall of books and knick knacks, so crowded with each that there was no telling if it was a bookshelf nor a knick knack nook. The beating white hot sun shone in through a grid of windows behind them all, the wooden frame stained black in the harsh light. Hearts’s bass was leaned up in the opposite cornering, snoozing in the shade along with his record player and two heavy shelves stuffed with records. From the window the old boxy air conditioner stuttered and sighed weakly.

“Who’s that?” Aradia pointed at Bray Wyatt and turned to her uncles.

“S’Bray Wyatt,” Clubs answered, fishing a beer out of the orange cooler set between his recliner and Hearts’s. “He’s one of the bad guys, big cult leading greaseball. Him and his cousins are all a bunch of goth moonshiners.”

Bray, the leader of the family, was tossing Roman around the ring while his cousins, one a smaller and dirtier clone of Bray and the other a giant wearing a mask in the shape of a sheep’s head, hollered to him from the other side of the ropes. 

“Why’s he get to do the chokeslam to Roman?” Aradia already loved Roman Reigns for his looks and more than that, how could she root against a Roman? “He’s a bad guy, so he’s supposed to lose, right?”

“Not always,” Hearts sat back with his cold beer can sitting on his beefy chest. Like Clubs, he was more of a Brock Lesner, the ‘Vanilla Gorilla’, guy and that match would highlight the pay-per-view after the leathery, long haired soap opera that was the Reigns and Wyatt feud. Just enough time to get a good buzz on, and teach his niece a thing or two about wrestling. “See that’s how it all works, your faces fight the heels but the heels are sneaky and they’ll win more than a few of those matches.”

“That’s how the show keeps going,” Sollux lisped from where he was laying on his back on the floor. His glasses had fallen over his forehead but he watched without them, upside down. 

“Right, your faces have to struggle or else there’s nothing going on. And then when the time’s right the faces get it done in the ring.” Clubs told Aradia. “There wouldn’t be much of a show if the faces always won just because the heels were heels. And it’d mean you didn’t have good villains, neither.” 

Hearts, Clubs and their boys spent plenty of Monday nights right here, drinking in the weekly drama. It had taken this long to infect his niece and nephew because they were outplayed by Droog and an insane number of Scrabble championships from the house across the street. Now, with their fathers thoroughly distracted, was Hearts’s moment to strike. 

“Villains are always the best part, anyhow.” He said, cheersing his beer with Clubs’s as he spoke. 

“And the faces keep fighting until everything comes to a big important match every three weeks or so.” Sollux added. He was holding up his glasses to his face, peering to try and read the goofy signs waving from the audience. 

“So the faces fight the heels and the heels push them to keep fighting,” Aradia put it together for herself, petting her puffball of hair as she thought. 

“And they always do the big crazy-ass speeches and then bodyslams?” Karkat asked from the couch, following the action between the gorgeous Roman Reigns and the otherworldly Bray Wyatt. He’d never seen men so huge and slippery acting so loudly, and while he’d seen Slick airboxing before wrestling was bringing into focus a whole different world of fighting. He already felt for Roman, who was being sidestepped and overpowered by Bray hit for hit. He fell back into the mat with a springy ‘kah-thwunk!’ and Wyatt started slamming his foot almost all the way down on his chest, imitating a kick that would’ve bashed Reigns’s ribs. “I, I mean, like, that’s it? Just bodyslams?”

He tried to regain some of his disgruntled composure, scrunching back up in the crook of the couch’s arm.

“Heh, that’s exactly it. Pretty silly, huh?” Hearts indulged him. 

“Yeah, I mean, like, can’t they talk it out or something? So stupid.” Karkat pinched the collar of his shirt and pulled it up over his nose to hide his mouth, and maybe a smile?

“They’re not really good at talking things out. I mean, they’re really good at talking but not communicating.” Tavros admitted from his spot at the foot of his dad’s recliner. He’d recently graduated from reams of printer paper to sketchbooks, and was laying on his belly working in one while the match unfolded. His favorite parts were the intros and costumes and, like Karkat, the melodramatic speeches. The fight itself was his time to draw out what he’d be as a wrestler. “But that’s not, like, the best part anyway. Look, here he comes.”  
On screen a clean shaven but sweaty and disheveled white guy came barreling into the stadium in a blast of electric power chords. Behind him the jumbo-tron lit up in black, red and white: ‘!!DEAN AMBROSE!!’

He came running down the ramp towards the ring, just as Wyatt was picking Reigns up by his long, wet tresses and starting to lay in a round of beats. 

Ambrose, a redhead in only a pair of jeans and a tank top, jumped into the ring and skidded on his belly right under the ropes. He bounced up onto his feet and kicked Wyatt in the back, dislodging him from Roman. Wyatt’s cousins hollered and beat on the edge of the ring as Bray toppled forward and Roman fell into Ambrose’s out stretched, oily arms. 

“Wrestling is all about fighting for your friends,” Tavros said dreamily, watching the screen. Reigns and Ambrose panted in each other’s faces, smiling as the crowd roared.

“Bro,” Dean started, “Dean Ambrose might be crazy, bro, but he’d never let his brother down in a fight, bro!” 

He and Roman slammed their hands together in a Predator handshake and Roman gave him and the camera a dazzling smile. 

“I knew I could count on you, my bro!” Roman brought it in for a hug and the crowd went wild. He broke it and held Ambrose at arms length again, giving their best sides to the camera. “Now how about we kick some hillbilly ass?!”

“Wooow,” Aradia and Karkat were both transported. Hearts glanced back at his nephew, his dark cheek swelling into a sly smile as Karkat looked back at him and very determinedly pulled down the collar of his shirt to reveal a practiced, grumpy frown. 

“See?” Said Tavros. “They’re like superheroes, they team up and it’s even better. And those guys, they use their special moves together.” 

Tavros leaned up from his sketchbook just enough for Hearts to steal a peek at his drawing. As ever, Hearts was delighted by Tavros’s art and now that he was moving up to bonafide sketchbooks Hearts couldn’t help being even nosier. Right now it looked like a figure drawing of a minotaur with a championship belt and a flowing, tattered cape. 

Tavros caught his dad’s gaze and put his hands over the drawing. “You can’t see it till it’s done, Pop!”  
“Okey, okey, you’re the artist.” Hearts sat back and finished his beer, tossing it into the cooler with the other empties bobbing against its plastic walls. He pulled out a fresh one and cracked it. 

Reigns and Ambrose faced Wyatt. Ambrose lured him into the far corner from his cousins, hunching forward like an angry drunk and bouncing just out of Wyatt’s reach step for step. Wyatt closed on him and Ambrose pulled them into a clinch, both men pulling against one another. Roman ran back and forth across the stage, riling the crowd and then turning and riding a wave of applause straight for Bray Wyatt, both fists held out ahead of him. He speared into Wyatt’s back and sent him to the mat, where the big man bounced slightly and reeled in ‘pain.’ 

The announcers went nuts, as the faces had turned a hairy situation into an all out win for themselves. 

“That’s it? They won?” Karkat sat up, looking surprised and maybe a little dejected, his baby-face knotted here and there. 

“Not quite.” 

The camera pulled back from the action to reveal the Wyatt cousins ducking in through the ropes, coming down the ring on either side of the ailing mountain that was Bray Wyatt. The ref was nowhere to be found and the announcers couldn’t believe it!, explaining how illegal this was to have a three on two bout! 

“Your heels have to give them a run for their money before anybody wins.” Hearts explained. 

The little clone of Bray came after Ambrose while Bray and the silent giant in the sheep’s mask turned on Roman. The faces didn’t back down, Ambrose swung in his usual mad style at the clone and knocked him off balance. Another punch had him on the mat and Ambrose stomped at him, letting the mat down the real damage. Reigns looked between his two opponents, Bray heaving himself from the floor and the giant bearing down the ring for Roman. He launched himself into the giant, landing a solid spear into his middle that the masked man didn’t seem to feel at all. 

The man in the mask caught Reigns’s arms and pinned them back, while Bray came up from the mat and started a vengeful beating right in front of the camera. 

“That’s not fair!” Karkat exclaimed, a little spit flying from his braces. 

“Told you you’d be into it.” Sollux looked over at him from the floor.

“But--but it’s so dumb, fighting like that, uh, of course it’s not fair because they just do this for TV.” Karkat didn’t manage to save face so he balled back up and tried to watch silently. 

“Oh no oh no,” Aradia watched her new favorite Roman get the snot fake-punched out of him, Ambrose in the other corner of the ring keeping the clone down. Ambrose looked over his shoulder at the struggling Roman and then stepped out of the ring, pulling the ropes apart and dropping down to the floor below. “What’s Dean doing? He should be helping Roman!”  
“Oh he is,” Clubs looked over at Hearts, who like him was beaming now that the kids were about to see one of the most classic moves of all time. 

“What do you mean?” Aradia was tugging on her hair, getting more and more wound up. “He’s just reaching under the stage? What’s under there--” 

“He’s got a chair!” The announcers yelled over the action, as Dean Ambrose pulled a metal folding chair out from under the ring. Ambrose took no time getting around to the corner Roman was trapped in and swinging hard on the masked giant. The chair connected with the back of his head with a resonating metallic ‘thwang!’ and he crumpled against the ropes. 

Reigns was free, he ducked one of Bray’s fists so it sent his cousin toppling over the ropes. That left the two of them against the cult leader. 

Roman Reigns broke away, circling the ring for another spear while Ambrose hooked an arm around the back of Wyatt’s neck, pulled the two of them into a clinch and then kicked his legs out from under himself, throwing them both down to the mat with the full weight of his body. Wyatt landed hard on his face, curling up like a bug while Ambrose landed on his butt and bounced up again. 

He hung onto the ropes, jeering at the crowd as they screamed for Roman’s finisher. Roman trotted to line up with Wyatt, who sat up on his knees just in time for another full body spear. Wyatt was on his back now. Dean and Roman came together, standing arm in arm with a foot from each of them pinning Bray down. 

The ref finally appeared, counted them down and that was it, Reigns and Ambrose had won the match! 

“Oh my gosh,” Aradia sat with her face in her hands, gently pulling her cheeks down from her wide eyes. “Papa totally lied, he said this was stupid. He said it wasn’t even real.” 

“It’s really hot in here,” Karkat said, fanning himself and trying to hide the fact that he’d been sweating ever since the match became a three on two. “Is anyone else sweating like a lot, like sweaty and anxious, like because of the heat?”

Clubs polished off his second beer, dunking it into the icy water in the cooler, then fishing around for a new can. Hearts glanced over, feeling a few drops of the cold water and watching the kids as they all reeled from the drama of professional wrestling. Clubs pulled out a beer and rubbed water from his dripping arm, then cracked his tab and spied a look in Hearts’s eyes.

“Penny for your thoughts, big guy?”

Hearts touched a big hand to his face and then answered: “Say Clubs, you still got those blow-up kiddie pools from last summer? You had like four or five of them, didn’t you?” 

“Well yeah, they were buy one get one so I doubled the double and bought four, I’m not an idiot Hearts.” Clubs rubbed his cold, wet hand across his face. 

“What would it take to make them into a ring? Like sew ‘em together into one giant kiddie pool?” Hearts asked. 

“Like cut em open and what, pizza slice them all together like Frankenstein’s pool?” Clubs poked a dripping finger into the tiny cleft of his chin and drew it up to his lower lip. “Well they’re just thin blown PVC so a little time with the heat gun will seal ‘em back up tight enough to keep the air in. Why? You want to try homebrewing in PVC? It’s gonna make a plasticky beer but that might work for an IPA…” Clubs considered brewing IPA’s then cringed and shook his head in disgust. 

“No, no, maybe.” Brewing beer in a giant pool opened up another possibility to Hearts: drinking a giant pool’s worth of beer. “That’s not where I was going today. Hey, kids, you guys want to try wrestling for yourselves?”

Tavros looked up brightly, Aradia’s head spun quickly to face her uncle and Karkat looked wide eyed and sweaty. 

“It’s way too hot to wrestle, Uncle Hearts.” Sollux told him from the floor, sitting up so he could face him. 

“No it’s not,” Hearts told him. “Not with a backyard blowup pool super, uh, summer, a super summer slam splashdown showdown.”

“What?” All of them looked lost.

“We’ll set up the kiddie pools and fill the ring with water and you guys can splash around while you play-fight.” Hearts followed up his tag-line with his actual idea.

“Oh, sick!” Sollux cottoned to it immediately. 

“Can I wear my costume? I’ve been working on it for a while and I think it’s like, really good.” Tavros hopped up from the floor, his freckled face bright and excited. 

“Can you get it wet?” Hearts knit his brows. 

“Yeah, I mean it’s mostly shower curtain so, uh, I’ll go get it and show you!” Tavros hurried upstairs. 

“So that’s where his shower curtain went,” Hearts had been puzzling over that one for a while now. 

“Aradia, Sollux, come help me track down those pools and the heat gun and the bike pump,” Clubs jumped down from his seat, nodded for the two kids to follow him and led them out the front to the other side of the duplex. 

Karkat sat on the couch with his eyebrows almost touching, lips pursed in thought. 

“You think you wanna join us, Karkat?” Hearts asked, closing up the cooler and slowly rising from his recliner. He sighed and rubbed his belly, letting his nephew decide. 

“I mean, yeah I’ll probably just like, watch from in here because it’s so hot and wreslting is like fu-freaking dumb because you should just be able to talk it out and stuff.” He looked around the room, not at his uncle nor the TV. “I might like, come out to splash in the pool or whatever, but I’m not gonna like, pretend to be a wrestler like they are.”

Karkat shook his head noncommittally and shrugged, finally looking up at Hearts. 

“That’s fine, sure,” Hearts nodded along. “You can tell us if we put on a good show. You can be our announcer, how’s that?”  
“Ye-yeah, that’s what I want.” Karkat said, fiddling with a loose thread in his shirt. Hearts picked up the cooler and pushed his chin towards the back of the house. 

“C’mon, why don’t you get the door and you can help us set up outside. We need a smart kid like you to help us have our dumb fun.”

“Yeah, yeah, of course I’ll help. You guys would probably end up filling the pool with beer if I didn’t come.” Karkat jumped up and ran ahead of Hearts, opening the back door for his uncle to bring the cooler out to the duplex’s shared backyard. 

“We’d be lost without you,” Hearts agreed.


	4. Self Management

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Class continues and Slick and Droog struggle with restraints.

* * *

“Fran, really, thanks for taking the time.” Moose stood outside of his classroom with the door open a couple inches so he could keep an eye on the rest of the class while he talked to Slick and Crowbar in the hall. They were standing shoulder to shoulder in front of Moose, Crowbar with a black eye and Slick with a busted lip.

Fran stood next to Moose, arms akimbo holding a clutch of paperwork she’d been taking to the copy machine when Moose flagged her down. For being so feared Fran was a surprisingly young and peppy woman, all of twenty-eight with bright eyes and pink cheeks. She’d really found her calling with the OCU and was on a career path that gave her a lot of job satisfaction. Her hair was pinned up in a halo of black waves and she wore a grey tweed suit not unlike Moose’s, just without the golf ball sized buttons. Her face was unwrinkled except for her laugh-lined cheeks and a particular seam under her sharp blue eyes that made Slick a little queasy when he made eye-contact with her. The crazy peeked out there, especially when she smiled.

“For you Moose? Anytime.” She patted Moose’s wide back with the rustle of paperwork she was carrying. Her voice was cheery and low. “Now what’s the problem here, huh? You need me to take these two to the remedial class?”

“Oh, whoa, no no no,” Crowbar’s face turned a couple shades greener and Slick tensed up and shook his head rapidly.

“Nah nah nah, we’re not there yet,” he turned his eye searchingly to Moose.

Moose squared his big shoulders and spoke sternly. “Really? Now you’re sure, because it seems like just a minute ago you were ready to take Ms. Fran’s class.”

Fran looked them over, a cold reptilian look in her pale eyes. Crowbar’s mouth worked in and out of a few twists, trying to find something to say.

“Wha-what’re you mad at me for? Slick’s the one who can’t take a joke,” he managed, facing Moose. 

Fran grabbed his lapels and yanked him closer to her. She was just shorter than him, so her cold stare cut up across Crowbar’s face. He let out a miserable little squeak.

“So you don’t want to admit your part in all this. A leader ducking responsibility? What kind of message does that send to your men?” Fran kept leering at him and Crowbar’s lip wavered like he might cry. “If you can’t take responsibility and set a good example your teammates won’t either. More than that, how do you expect to be respected if you won’t give respect?”

Slick snorted while Crowbar blubbered, grasping for a response. The sound from Slick turned Fran’s attention to him and he went from snickering to staggering back as she stepped up to him. Taller than him, she leaned down to get in Slick’s face when she had him backed against the beige tiled wall.

“And you, you refuse to simply not take the bait. Is that really easier than a little thought and follow through? You’re smart enough to know the right thing to do for other people, so why do you choose not to do it?” Fran straightened up and seemed mammalian again as she looked back at Moose. “You’re sure you don’t want me to just take them? I don’t mind doing you a favor, Moose. Sounds like we need some tough love for these two.”

“You’re too sweet,” Moose shook his shaggy head. “But we’re not giving up yet, these boys just need to give it some practice, isn’t that right Slick?”

Slick grumbled at the ground and nodded his head, kicking invisible dirt. “Yeah, I mean it’s like you’re always saying, it’s just practice and mindfulness…”

“Ah, see, little by little you’re getting to him.” Fran elbowed Moose, smiling at his good work. 

“No!” Slick said petulantly. 

“No? So you’re not picking up how to be emotionally responsible?” Fran’s cold eyes were on his again. “Come and try my class. I know some ways to get mindfulness...” 

Fran put the tip of one cold finger on Slick’s forehead, left it there for a moment then drew a chilly line across to the strap of his eyepatch. 

“To really stick in your brain.”

She tugged on the eyepatch’s strap, pulling Slick’s head forward by an inch and then letting go. His patch stayed in place but the tug let a breeze blow passed the empty socket that led straight back to his frontal lobe. Slick picked his chin up from his chest and tried to meet Fran’s eyes, meaning to snarl when he just ended up grimacing. The snake’s glimmer in her eyes watched his ratty face closely. 

“I heard you couldn’t find eye-ball-clamps for a guy like me.” He growled.

“Yeah? You’re really in the know. You’re right, they don’t make clamps for just one side of the face, but that’s not the end of the world. I can still pin your good eye open and let the other side of the clamps sit in your eye socket. I’ve been experimenting a little and I’ve found that adding an electrode to a guy’s exposed optical nerve really,  _ really _ helps him focus on his mindfulness.” Fran showed a smile of sharp white teeth. 

Slick swallowed and shut up, glancing passed Fran to Moose and Crowbar. Crowbar was a sickly seaweed color and Moose was looking at his fingernails.

“Alright,” Slick said softly. “I’m ready for class now.”

“You’re what?” Moose cupped a big paw behind his ear, turning it to Slick. “Come again?”

“I’d like to go back to class,” Slick said, trying and failing to match Fran’s reptilian stare. She smiled at him and Slick scrambled around her back to Moose. “You’re not giving up on me, you already said.” 

Moose stood up, as big as a bear and almost as hairy. He rubbed his belly and shook his head.

“No I’m not giving up on you, not yet. C’mon.” He pushed open the door for Slick, who stalked back into the smoky classroom with Crowbar on his heels. Moose gave Fran a thumbs up as he came back inside and she smiled and waved to him, cheery as ever heading back to the copy room. 

“I’ll see you real soon, boys!” Her voice slithered in behind them as the door closed. 

“You’re a real hard guy, Slick,” Crowbar’s voice whispering behind him was grating enough without the phantom ache in his bad eye at the mention of clamps and electrodes. “Scared of some crazy broad.”

Slick sat down in his spot next to Droog, balling his metal fist on his desk and rubbing around his bad eye with his good hand. Droog sat silently smoking like a chimney, he was the reason the air in the room was now powerfully acrid. Crowbar swung into his seat again, propping his crummy feet on the bar holding the back legs of Slick’s chair.

“You want me to call Fran back, Crowbar?” Moose singled him out from the front of the class. “Since you’re having such a good time maybe you ought to try this her way. Y’know just a minute ago you got your buddy Die here hit with a desk because you couldn’t help picking a fight. You really want to start up again?”

Crowbar crossed his arms and looked away sullenly. It was true, almost as soon as he and Slick squared up the rest of the class fell into chaos. Itchy, Quarters and Droog all jumped to action. Droog armed himself as best he could and took out his nearest target. He grabbed one of the desks by the legs and swung it, hitting a homerun on Die, who was sent into the wall behind him and collided with a blurring Itchy.

“You two want to be leaders but you’re not looking out for your boys at all here.” Moose held forth. “I already told youse, this class is pass or fail and if you can’t work together you’re all gonna be strapped to one of Fran’s tables watching the same PowerPoint I got here. So we can be adults and do this the easy way or you can all do it the hard way.”

The class was hushed, everyone eyeing each other before looking sheepishly at Moose. 

“Slick, Crowbar, let’s hear it. No more fighting today, right?”

Crowbar sighed heavily, shifting his feet and rattling the back of Slick’s chair. He sat up and rolled his padded shoulders. “Boys, we’re all cool, eh?”

“Yeah, of course, cool as cucumbers.” Itchy buzzed.

“Sure,” Quarters said heavily, leaning back in his seat and straining the plastic back of his chair.

“Yeah, yeah,” Die, bruised and still antsy from Droog’s hit, tucked his bony fist against his temple so he wouldn’t have to see Droog or Slick. “Sure, Crow.”

Slick wriggled in his seat, arms crossed with his hands flexing open and closed on his spindly arms. He huffed and nodded, turning to Droog. “Droog, don’t do nothing stupid.”

Droog blew out a contemptuous puff of smoke but he didn’t grab anymore chairs and start swinging them around.

Moose flipped to the next slide of his PowerPoint.

**Activity 2**

**Self-Management:** What happens when you act or do not act. Being aware of how your emotions direct your behavior.

Use constructive criticism coupled with physical restraint to practice self-management as a class. 

“So we made it through step one with no casualties, let’s keep it moving. We’ll start step two: Self-Management.” Behind Moose the animated clipart at the bottom of the slide showed a cartoon gangster pondering something with a little gangster angel and a federal agent devil dancing on his shoulders. 

“Self-Management is how we handle ourselves, how we process what we’re thinking and feeling and use it to act in our own best interest. To our leaders in the room,” Everyone looked at Slick and Crowbar. When Slick saw Droog looking at him with the same poignant stare as Moose and the Felt he let out a little betrayed noise. “Self-management is key to making the best decisions for your group and not letting something like a rivalry and a few bad jokes get the best of you.”

Moose put his hand down on the stack of files on his desk. 

“Since self management is something the whole class seems to struggle with we’re going to pare it down to just not doing something you know would make you fail my class. Now, show of hands, who’s got more than ten charges for aggravated battery?” 

Slick, Droog, Itchy, Crowbar and Quarters raised their hands.

“Itchy, c’mon, I've got your file right here. You think it doesn’t have your rap sheet inside?” Moose held up Itchy’s file and Itchy lowered his hand, looking embarrassed. Slick smirked but kept his trap shut. 

“Now who’s got more than fifteen?” Slick, Droog and Quarters kept their hands up. “More than twenty?”

Droog alone held his hand up.

“Really?” Slick looked up at him. “I thought nineteen was your record.”

“I got another couple last week,” Droog hummed dully.

“You didn’t tell me that.” Slick was shocked to be out of the loop, Droog had been so anxious to finally break into the twenties.

“It was just a regular Tuesday,” Droog shrugged. “I don’t tell you everything.”

“You  _ don’t _ ?” Slick’s good eyebrow shot up his head. 

“Oh ho,” Crowbar’s foot justled the back of Slick’s chair again. “Trouble in paradise.”

“You didn’t tell me you play Pokeymon now,” Droog snubbed his cigarette and added it to the mess of butts around his desk, hissing his last puff of smoke at Slick.

“I—it was Karkat’s idea, you know how much he loves those games!” Slick felt himself start redden. “He wanted me to try it so I did, what’s the big deal?”

“Ah, Slick! You’re so close—” Moose clapped his hands together and looked excited. “Why don’t you tell us about that?”

“About what? Pokemons? It’s kind of a lot to explain…” Slick scratched his head. “So there’s these creatures, like at least fifty or so called Pokemons—” 

“No, tell us why you decided to play it. Your son is a big fan, right? And you wanted to see what the hubbub was about.”

“Yeah…” Slick said slowly. “I don’t know, I thought it’d give us something to talk about. He’s at an age where, uh, I don’t know what to tell him all the time so, I guess I figured why not try it out.” 

“So you took stock of what you wanted for your relationship and made a change that would benefit both of you. See, you’re already getting this.” Moose was absolutely beaming.

Droog snorted, taking his cigarettes out and fishing in the empty pack for his last one. He found it and stood it upright in his desk, rustling in his jacket for the second pack he’d put somewhere. 

Slick shrank in his seat.

“Well it started that way,” Slick explained. “But then the game didn’t work so good and I ended up dropping the Gameboy down the stairs.”

Moose squinted at him, but managed to keep a judgemental edge out of his voice.

“So you dropped your kid’s toy down a flight of stairs, on accident?”

“Eh, yeah?” Slick wasn’t about to admit to any of them that ‘accident’ and ‘drop’ were more gentle word choices than the reality of the situation. He’d gotten frustrated training one of the little rat Pokemons and while in a tizzy about how much he was losing he’d been too wrapped up in the game to put it down. Maybe playing on the stairs wasn’t a great idea but that just happened to be where he was when his little rat bit it and went down. He didn’t think it would bother Karkat so bad, but the damage was done anyway so why would his kid still want to cry over spilled Gameboy? 

“So how’s your son feel about that?”

Slick felt himself heating up, first with embarrassment and then with something useful: rage.

“Lousy. Hey what the hell do you have to say about it anyway? You got a touchy feely fucking degree in telling me how to raise my kid all of a sudden?” He braced himself against his desk with both hands.

“You really don’t see how any part of this class could help you with your son?” Moose’s slow, calm manner of speaking only took a little bite out of what he said. “Kids need to know their parents care about their emotional wellbeing. And you can’t go around breaking their toys. You told the little guy you were sorry right?”

Slick snarled, barely breathing. 

“No, what the fuck you want to say about my kid, Moose?”

For the first time Moose looked fully aware that he had touched a nerve, and mindful of the danger he was in. The Union’s law of peace within its walls could only protect him as much as his students pride allowed, and nothing ruffled feathers here like an insult to one’s family. 

“Nothing about your kid, Slick.” He said firmly but gently, his soft face tightening so his black eyes and pug nose were more pronounced, making him look every bit the mobster he was. “But how’d you feel if someone broke what was yours and didn’t even say they was sorry?”

Slick’s nose wrinkled and he ground his teeth, but he lost the viciousness that talking about Karkat with Moose and the green jackasses had built. 

“So what, it’s a stupid toy. I wouldn’t feel any way about it once they made me whole again.” He said spitefully, trying to make a point to Moose and watching it bounce right off the big man. 

“That’s a place to start,” Moose nodded, softening a little but still walking on eggshells.

“Man, what a window into the li’l life of Slick,” Crowbar piped up, leaning his cheek into his hand.

“Fuck it! Forget I said anything,” Slick put up his hands, sick of all of them. “Why were you asking about our battery charges?”

“Ah, yeah,” Moose picked up his thread again. “Well since we can’t get anything done by talking to each other and connecting emotionally we’re going to make self-management a physical challenge.”

He stepped around his desk and drew his chair out from behind it, then brought it to the front of the class and took a long, sturdy length of rope from the deep drawer of the desk.

“Everyone is going to have three minutes in the chair, where we’ll use our limited self-management skills and the help of this rope to take criticism from the class.” Moose wagged one end of the rope at them, the body of it coiled in the seat of his chair. 

“Droog, you’re the most heavily charged so you’re up first.” 

Droog slunked down in his seat, turtling into his suit collar. He plucked the cigarette from his desk and put it between his lips. Slick reached over and punched his arm. 

“Cool it, I’m not putting you in an iron lung tonight.” He said.

Droog sighed and stood up, sat in the chair and held the bottom of his suit jacket down against his thighs so that it wouldn’t wrinkle too badly while Moose tied him up. There was a palpable change in the atmosphere in class once Moose looped the rope around Droog’s chest, his arms pinned in to his sides, and tied it at the back of the chair. Slick prickled up in his seat, turning his head to watch the back row of the class and snarl a little. Crowbar was in his blindspot but that didn’t matter, since he was just a mouth anyway. 

“And if anybody’s getting ideas,” Moose said smoothly, tying one knot against the back of the chair. “I’ll remind all of you that any attacks made on OCU grounds are going to be met with immediate termination with the Union and heavy fines for whatever group thinks it’s a great idea to fight a turf war on neutral territory.”

Droog just sat drearily, rolling his cigarette between his fingers. Slick snapped at the green dickheads behind him. 

“And anyway, we could still take you assholes if both of us was tied up.” His needley body was stiff in his seat and he turned his eye on each of them. Die looked especially nasty, rubbing his bony hands together. Itchy’s bright little eyes were ticking around the room, Quarters kept a heavy stare trained on Droog and Crowbar met Slick’s eye when it finally found him. 

Over Slick’s shoulder Moose was watching Crowbar as well, one hand on his air horn. 

“Yeah, sure you could,” Crowbar gave Slick a glare, and drummed his lime fingers on the desk but didn’t move out of his disinterested slump. 

“We’re taking steps, we’re moving right along here,” Moose turned one hand over the other, a rosy smile coloring his big face. Things had been touch and go but just like Fran said, it was starting to stick. “Now Droog you’ll take three minutes of criticism from the class. The rope is here to help with impulse control but I’ll be looking for a real effort from you to keep ahold of yourself.”

“You talk too much, Lozano.” Droog gave him a cold stare.

“Talking’s what helps me not get tied up.” Moose replied. 

“Oooh!” Die started the ‘ooh’ that the other Felts picked up as they got their engines revving for the exercise. Droog ground his teeth and pulled against the rope.

“Slick,” Moose pointed to him and Slick looked up. “You’re on Droog’s team here, so it’ll be your job to remind him why he needs to sit through this if he really starts boiling over.” 

“Okey…” Slick didn’t see what he could say to Droog that would calm him down, apart from maybe a promise that they could jump the Felt as soon as they all left the building.

“Who wants to start us off?”

“You swing a desk like a sick little girl!” Die came in hot. 

“And you take a hit like a sicker little girl. Don’t look away, I can still see you tearing up.” Droog spat back at him. Die turned away and sniffed loudly. 

“Do I really need to tell you that’s not what you’re supposed to do here?” Moose asked him.

“You said it was a physical challenge,” Droog’s disdain for Moose couldn’t be clearer but more than that, he seemed angry that he’d already gotten the exercise wrong. “I’m sitting here tied up, what else do you want me to do?”

“Physically control your physical mouth from making words and saying them aloud, physically.” Itchy explained the disconnect in a rapid rattle. Droog glowered at him and Moose nodded.

“You want to sit tight, here. Don’t work yourself up or you’ll just end up taking the bait. Does that make some sense, Droog?” He explained. 

Droog looked back at the class, growing angry and icy. He put the cigarette he’d been toying with between his lips and reached into his pocket for his lighter. His arms were free enough to move his forearms, the rope pinning his upper arms to his side. If he was moved to he could work his way out of the ropes. 

“You’re a grown man who thinks not talking and smoking alone and brooding is a replacement for a personality,” Itchy rattled off. “News flash, it’s not. It’s just a way to keep people from finding out what a dumbass you are.” 

Droog’s lighter flicked to life and he snarled out a smoky breath. His arms pushed against the rope again, testing the strength of the rope so it dug into his biceps. He deflated with another puff of smoke and sat perfectly still. 

“You’re an awful old man.” Quarters said, dully meeting the stare Droog was sharpening to a razor’s edge. “And that suit is basic.”

Droog started to stand up, both hands grabbing for the knot that held him in place. He stood, the chair making him bend forward while he tried to get free. Slick jumped up. 

“Oh, Diamonds, wait a second, think about the health insurance!” Droog stilled when he mentioned it, short of breath already. Slick kept going. “No Union means no Union benefits. We already tried the freelance way, it fucked us good. We need that family plan. C’mon, you’re gonna walk out of full dental coverage because of these assholes?”

Droog sat back down with his breath hissing out between his grinding teeth. He focused on Slick, eyes still luminously white and sharp but dimming slowly. 

“You already get so mad about the deductible, but you know it’s peanuts to what we’d pay to get Karkat’s braces done out of pocket.” Slick knew this look well. For all that Droog was close to his edge Slick could always talk him back. “We drop our insurance and you’re gonna go completely grey, Diamonds.” 

“Yeah, listen to the wife, Droog.” Crowbar said nascally. He waved a hand through the smoky air and coughed pathetically into his hand. “You don’t want to lose the family plan right before the cancer finally gets you.” 

“Don’t!--” Slick sat up with his knees on the seat of his chair, blocking Droog’s view of Crowbar entirely. He held up a hand to Droog, who’d stepped back to the edge. As he spoke Slick’s eye floated from his husband to Moose. “Do it, don’t do it. Not right now but later outside the parking lot,”

“As long as it’s a hundred yards from Union property.” Moose had his watch up to his face, his other hand giving a thumbs up. “And that’s time! Some nice work, Droog. And Slick, I’m glad to see you thinking more big picture, especially for the kids. Now next time let’s have some more emotional language, huh?” 

“I’m not a idiot,” Slick grumbled, despising Moose’s encouragement. “They’re not worth losing the family plan…”

Moose untied Droog and he stepped back to his seat, petting his seams and smoothing himself out. Slick could already see the gleam in his eye that meant he’d be spending the night ironing everything they owned. He reached over and squeezed Droog’s bicep again as they both sat back down. To his surprise Droog gave him the most affection he could muster in public: he touched Slick’s hand where it held his arm and squeezed, then took his hand away and then his arm. 

Maybe the iron wouldn’t be the only thing heating up tonight.

Slick sat back, impressed with himself, while Moose was saying something or other.

“Slick? How many?”

“Nine. What?” Slick came back to class and looked at Moose. 

“How many aggravated battery charges do you have?” Moose asked, the rope in either hand. Quarters was watching Slick from the back row.

“Oh, sixteen.” Slick answered.

Quarter sucked his teeth and turned away, his bulky arms folding over his chest. 

“Fifteen,” He admitted. 

“You’re up,” Moose held the rope up and stepped behind the chair, waiting for Slick. He got up and scrounged up to the front, sitting with a huff and letting Moose rope him to the chair. Just like he’d guessed, Moose was too touchy feely to tie him up so the ropes dug into his arms, but even so Slick couldn’t pull the knot loose once it was tied. 

“Oh boy,” Crowbar was rubbing his mits together and had a twinkle in his eyes. He started a nascal chatter of a laugh, pointing at Slick. “Look at his little legs kicking off the floor!”

Itchy’s laugh was high and about as soothing as a tap shoe to the face, Die had quiet laugh that turned into a breathy yucking noise in the back of his throat. 

“It’s because he’s tiny,” Quarters observed, getting a high five from Crowbar. 

“Where’s Droog got to shop, the extra petite itty bitty boy’s section?” Itchy chittered from the back. 

Slick cocked his head, his eye narrowing. 

“Do you know what you fucking look like, Uno Inch?”

“That’s just where you shop, Itchy.” Droog said callously, not turning from his view of Slick, who gave a rasping ‘ha!’

“Y’know Snowy’s gonna pick us up when we get out of here.” Crowbar said, sitting wobbly in his seat with both legs crossed over the top of his desk. The way he was sitting had his ass about three inches off the seat of the chair, his shoulders laying back with his arms folded behind his head. It looked like he was kicking back but the reality was that he was doing an intensive core workout without meaning to at all. He spoke with some effort, finding it hard to breathe with his abs pushing against his diaphragm. Unable to take the reverse plank, he turned down the back row and addressed his boys, slowly sliding back onto his ass with the desk pining his leg against his chest again. “So get ready to see Her Highness. What d’you think she’ll make of him smashing his kid’s toy?” 

Itchy whistled.   
“I think she’d call it one thing and one thing only and that’s bad parenting.” He said, bobbing his little head and crossing his extra petite arms. “Teaches kids force is the only way to deal with problems and that just ain’t right.” 

“Yeah,” added Quarters. “And shows ‘em their folks don’t respect what’s theirs.”   
They high fived and Moose stood arms akimbo, shaking his head. 

“Where has this been all day, boys? I swear youse two would’ve passed already if you’d let down the bravado.” He smiled slyly, glad to see Slick wasn’t the only person his lesson was starting to stick with. 

Slick only sat and snarled through the chatter. His fists balled and he tugged on the rope for something to do when Karkat was mentioned. He wanted to shout back at all of them that, hey, it wasn’t fucking easy raising a kid, but he didn’t have it in him. There wasn’t a lot to get mad about, since all the green birdbrains were doing was reciting what he already knew. He heated up, his anger at them bubbling poisonously in his stomach and reminding him he really was just as mad with himself. 

“Let’s see any of you do better, if that fucking wormhole had thrown a bunch of babies to you freaks you’d’ve thrown ‘em back in when you had to change your first diaper.” He said frostily, sitting tensed in the chair. “Takes real men to figure out how to raise a bunch of goddamn alternate universe wormhole babies, Christ’s sakes.” 

Slick turned away from them all, putting his eye on the empty corner of the room behind Moose’s desk, then looking back at Droog who gave him an approving nod. 

“Where would we even put babies in the manor,” Die turned his hollow face to the others, who all shrugged or looked around for an answer.   
“Your room, most likely.” Crowbar told him. “Or Eggs’ or Biscuits’.”   
“ _Idiota,_ ” Droog grumbled, shaking his head. He spoke directly to Slick. “These morons couldn’t find a family plan if it bit them in the ass.”

“Yeah well we know better than to throw a kid’s toys around!” Crowbar cut in as Moose was looking at his watch about to call the time. “Good fucking job there, Dad of the Year. Hope you had fun making your son cry.” 

“He only cried a little!” Slick snapped, wanting to punch Crowbar in that big glass jaw and make him bite his tongue.   
“That’s time,” Moose put a hand on the knot holding Slick in place, tugging on the ropes so they tightened up just as Slick was getting mad enough to try and lunge against them. The sudden tightness squeezed the wind out of Slick and he was forced to take a second and breathe. Then the rope went slack and he hopped to the floor, sulking back to his desk and staring a few daggers at Crowbar. He sat and got comfy again, turning tiredly to Droog while Moose coiled the rope around and around Quarters to get him anywhere close to pinned down. 

“It’s just dragging by,” Slick said in a low voice. Droog nodded, then pursed his lips and let his cigarette dangle low in the air for a moment. 

“You should’ve had breakfast, you wouldn’t be so tired now.” His droning voice almost sounded warm while they muttered to each other. 

“Cluck cluck cluck, mother hen,” Slick waved his comment away, then huffed and chewed on an idea and his bottom lip. “Just gotta wonder what the kids are up to.”

“I’m sure they’re watching Hearts and Clubs drinking their cheap beer.” Those two hadn’t shut up about their stupid wrestling marathon, after all. 

Slick sucked his teeth. Quarters was finally being tied off, a full five wraps around him when Droog and Slick alike had only needed two. 

“Y’don’t think we’re bad at the whole, y’know, kids, parents, thing.” Slick knit his eyebrows, wishing it had taken that much rope to get him pinned to the chair. “Do you?” 

“Maybe they’re a little spoiled. And we don’t hit them. Father hit me plenty and I turned out fine.” He shrugged and looked back at Slick. “But they seem like happy kids.” 

“Y’know a bad parent won’t sit around wondering if they’re a bad parent,” Moose told them both from the front. Quarters chuckled and grimaced at them, but Moose looked as sympathetic as ever. “And you never hit your kids, that’ll mess them up worse than anything else. Even a spanking will stay with them for years and years. Has a detrimental effect on their developmental cycles for their brains.” 

Droog snorted at that. 

“Then explain how I turned out alright.” 

There was a hush in the classroom and Moose finally broke it, wetting his lips and putting a hand on Quarters’s shoulder.

“How about we keep moving, huh?”


	5. Setting Up

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The kids work on their wrestling personas and Karkat has a heart-to-Hearts.

* * *

“I want to do the chokeslam for my finisher!” Aradia had made no headway on her costume but she’d been the only one in the backyard practicing any real moves in pool-ring once it was set up. So far she’d splashed through an elbow slam, a few big, low impact punches and had gotten the hang of stomping in the half filled pools to imitate stomping someone into the mat. All that was left was her finisher, which she wanted to make an almost-lethal spectacle. 

“I’m gonna tell you right now you’re not chokeslamming anybody,” Clubs told her. He wore a towel around his neck and, like her, no shoes in the ring. He had been sparring with her to teach her the right way to lay beats and make sure she didn’t hurt anyone. “But I’ll show you how to do that slam Dean Ambrose does, how’s that?” 

“Yes!” She bounced in the water and splashed them both, but they were already soaked from practice.

“Okey, now c’mere and stand behind me with your arm around here.” He positioned them over the bounciest spot in the pool-ring and showed her how to get her arm hooked around his throat without pressing on his windpipe. “So you put your hand on my back and pull, right, and when you feel me start to go you kick your legs out and we both bounce to the mat, you got it?” 

“Uh,” she followed his directions, tugging uncertainly on him before spreading her feet and finding a stronger stance. “Okey, yeah, I think so.” 

“Okey on three. One, two, three--” 

They went down in a big splash, Clubs landing full on his back while Aradia bounced once on her butt and popped right back up. 

“Yes yes! I did it!”

“Yeh,” Clubs wheezed, laying in the water as it rocked against his sides, gingerly rubbing his throat. He put up a hand for Aradia and she pulled him back up. “You got it.” 

Karkat watched from the shady side of the yard, where the back of the duplex was casting a shadow big enough for two lounge chairs, the cooler, Hearts and his nephew. The boy had a sour look on his face while he watched his other uncle and his sister playing. He turned away and pouted just as sourly at Tavros and Sollux, who were making costumes out of swim trunks, old pillow cases, tin foil and a box of odds and ends Clubs dug up from the basement along with the pools. 

Hearts picked his beer up from where it had been resting on his chest and pointed at his nephew with one fat finger. 

“Hey, y’know you can go play with them if you want to, right?” They’d spent the last couple hours setting up the pools, filling them from the hose and making a fence around the ring out of pool noodles and plastic lawn flamingos. The whole time poor Karkat had seemed miserable, starting off razzing the whole set up and then simply watching silently. Hearts could think of only one other time he’d ever seen Karkat so quiet, and it was when he was miserably sad and sore right after getting his braces. “You’re a kid in summer, you should be having fun.” 

“No, it’s dumb anyway,” Karkat shook his head, crossing his arms and staring stubbornly at the ground. “Wrestling’s dumb and violent and I don’t want to like, do slams or anything like that. It’s just big slippery guys yelling at each other and then doing bodyslams.” 

As he spoke Hearts could see two sides pulling Karkat in opposite directions, one keen to have buoyant bombastic fun and the other insistent that he was above all this. 

“Yeah, you’re right. It’s not the sport of kings or anything, really the logic holding it together is just foolishness.” Hearts took a swig of his beer then continued. “But there’s nothing wrong with fighting. I mean like fighting for your friends or for what’s right. Or just having some dumb fun. After all, the dumbness is what makes it fun.”

“Yeah,” Karkat plopped into the grass and started pulling it out of the ground. He sunk his fingers into the dirt, feeling the heat that had baked into the soil while he traced the long roots that crisscrossed the yard sprouting grass. “Putting on a shower curtain and doing belly flops in the pool is extra dumb.” 

He watched Tavros and Sollux experimenting with their costumes. Tavros’s was the most elaborate, made of a shower curtain he had cut arm holes in and turned so that two of the rings that should’ve held it to the curtain rod was used to hold it together at his neck and turn the whole thing into a long, plasticky, see-through cloak. He had a headband on with cardboard bull’s horns taped on and painted orange, a clip-on earring stuck in his nose to emulate a septum ring, and one of Hearts’s old belts wrapping his whole ensemble up. The belt bucket, which was brass and tarnished but still a massive chunk of shiny metal, looked just as big on Tavros as a real championship belt would look on a real wrestler. 

Sollux had a simpler look, though his was glaringly shiny in the afternoon sun. He’d wrapped his arms and legs in tinfoil, found a pair of old 3D glasses from the basement and put them on over his regular glasses. He was in the process of painting a pair of deely boppers, the styrofoam balls set on long springs attached to a headband. With their new coat of black paint and the springs in orange they would look like bombs boggling on top of his head. 

“Just seems like you’d like to do something else instead of picking grass.” Hearts watched Karkat shrug his little shoulders, just spying a pouting lip pointing out from his baby face. “I know you’re the leader of the pack and so responsible and mature, but doesn’t it look like they’re having even a little fun?” 

“Maybe,” Karkat shrugged again, pushing his shoulders up extra high and then slumping them back down. “I’m not mad or anything. Everyone wanted to do wrestling and you said I could help so I did.” 

“And you were a real old hand with the bike pump, for sure.” Hearts nodded in agreement. “Kind of think after working your butt off on a hot day like this you’d like a chance to splash around some.” 

Hearts rolled the cold, sweating side of his beer can across his forehead and sighed dramatically, adding to his comment about the heat. Karkat pushed a few streaks of sweat from his own face back into his hair. He sulked in the grass watching everyone else playing.

“I’m not gonna go and do a bunch of silly, stupid slams and punches just to play in the pool.” Karkat said while Aradia and Clubs exchanged a few showy, no-contact punches and Clubs mimicked stumbling back, dazed from an uppercut. He fell back carefully in the water, going to his knees and then softly to his back while Aradia bounced around him with her arms in the air. They were both making hushed, cheering crowd noises and a storm of splashes such that they didn’t feel the day’s heat at all. Tavros and Sollux, fully costumed, came over and climbed between the noodles and flamingos to join them, wobbling on the bouncy rubber of the pool floor. “So stupid, like what’s even fun about that, you could be like…”  
Karkat trailed off and Hearts kept an eye on him, loudly slurping his beer behind his nephew. They looked at each other and Karkat blushed, hurrying to finish his thought. “Reading? Or something else, like, not stupid at all.”

“Oh yeah,” Hearts nodded, folding his hands around his beer can on top of his belly. “That’s just the thing for a hot summer day.” 

“Well I didn’t know how today was gonna turn out.” Karkat rubbed his fat cheeks. “I didn’t know it was gonna be so hot or I’d still be fighting with Dad. Just like you didn’t know you’d be stuck with us instead of watching the pay-per-view like you wanted. Today just got in the way of everyone. Aren’t we getting in your way?”

“What? No, of course not. Don’t be silly, we’re supposed to watch you guys today, the pay-per-view waited this long, it can wait a little more.” Hearts set his beer down in the cupholder on the arm of his chaise lounge. “If you think I’d rather watch those guys than spend some time with you kids you’re nuts, Karkat.” 

“You and Uncle Clubs are a lot better at kid stuff than Dad and Papa Diamonds.” Karkat told the grass. “They’d get all weird and snippy and tell us to go play somewhere else if we get in the way.”

“Is that true?” Hearts didn’t doubt that their folks could be snippy, and petty, and hard to work with, but he’d also seen them raise two great kids. “Y’know it happens that when you’re mad at someone you only think of them the way your anger tells you to. So you’d forget all the good things about a guy because you’re too busy being angry at him. I should know, before I had Tavros I was like a raging bull, just mad all the time at everybody.” 

“You weren’t like that,” Karkat looked up at his Uncle Hearts and shook his head, not buying it. “You don’t have to lie to me, okey? I don’t believe you anyway, you act like a big teddy bear, you wear boxers with little hearts on them.”

Hearts wagged his finger at Karkat. 

“This is the real McCoy. Ask your dads, I would be the meanest guy on the Crew some nights. But then we had you guys and I started to think I didn’t want to be mad so much any more.” He drank the rest of his beer serenely, watching Clubs and Aradia splashing around. “Turns out I feel a lot happier just letting things roll off my back now.”

Karkat huffed and then huffed louder and longer and slowly turned around to face his uncle. He moved with his legs still spread out in the grass, turning himself with his hands and swinging around by picking his butt up off the ground a few inches then plopping back down with a view of Hearts. 

“Okey, I get it.” Karkat said. “You don’t have to keep trying to tell me all nice or whatever. I’m supposed to forgive Dad and let the fact that he broke my DS go, right?”

“What?” Hearts sat up. “Hell no, kid, that’s crazy! Yeah, it ain’t great to be angry, but the point isn’t to never get angry. The point is you get to decide how you face something and that’s what matters. Take your Dad for example, he lost at a video game and decided to face it by blowing his top and breaking something that wasn’t his. That’s wrong, and especially not what a grown ass adult should do.”

He opened the lid of the cooler, tossed his empty into the chilly water inside and closed it again. 

“I’ll tell you what, you don’t have to forgive him till he does right by you. Says he’s sorry and makes you whole again.” Hearts nodded at his own sound advice.

“Makes me whole?” Karkat looked confused. 

“It means he buys you a new Gameboy.” 

“Oh,” Karkat sat with that and thought about it. 

“Pop! Pop, can you show me how to use these for a boomerang?” Tavros came trotting over soggily with a pair of pink fuzzy dice from Hearts’s old car. “I want that to be my finisher, I throw them and it goes whooo-whoo-whoosh and hits when it swings back to me.”

He imitated throwing the dice and then held them up and turned in a circle to show them flying and curving in the air. Hearts put out his hand and sucked his teeth. 

“Sorry to say, buddy, but these aren’t gonna fly like that unless you tape them to a Frizbee.” He took the dice and turned them over in his hands. Despite being so soft they were weighty, making them even better for whacking each other with than a pool noodle. Hearts took one die in hand and twirled the other rapidly through the air. “How about this? You swing them around like a pair of nunchucks?” 

“Ohhh!” Tavros looked delighted by the idea, his freckled face turning rosy and his eyes glittering. He took them and twirled them around a lot more lopsided than Hearts did, getting a feel for it. “Yes! I learned how to use the magic dice-chucks when I studied magic in the Far East.” 

He threw them from one hand to the other and missed spectacularly, chasing halfway across the yard for them. 

“Hey, no orientalism, Tavros!” Hearts called after him. “The Far East is just the best place to learn nunchucks and get roast duck, okey?”

“Yeah, that’s what I meant!” Tavros called back, picking up his dice-chucks and trying out walking and twirling them. 

“It’s still fighting instead of solving your problems.” Karkat picked up his train of thought, fingers spread in the dirt in front of him. 

“You talk like you’re not the fightiest kid I know.” Hearts had to call him on that one. “Last week you sent me a ten page texted message about putting too much pepper in my risotto.” 

“Nuh uh!” Karkat insisted. “I was telling you what was wrong with it and how to make the best taste profile, and that’s not fighting! Just telling someone something and explaining it good and making sure they understand you by explaining your point isn’t fighting and it will never be! So that’s why it’s dumb to fight because you could just explain yourself and that’s why I don’t want to do backbreakers and chokeslams and all that crap!” 

“So you don’t want to play with us?” Aradia came up ringing out her wet hair in both hands. She crossed into the shady part of the yard and laid down in the grass with a sigh of relief. “You won’t fight at all? So you’re gonna forfeit the whole Super Summer Slam Splashdown Showdown?”

“Yeah,” Karkat stuffed his hands in his armpits, balling himself up. “It’s stupid. I won’t do it.”

“That’s awesome.” She grinned, stretching her arms out and letting them rest in the cool grass. “That way I get to be the Super Summer Slam Splashdown Showdown Champion and I don’t even need to kick your butt to do it. I’d feel bad beating you up when you’d spent all day feeling crummy.”

“You would not beat me--” Karkat immediately took the bait. Aradia looked up and made eye contact with Hearts, who smiled and nodded back. “I would so win, I would do a sweet kick and push you over to win. Uncle Clubs didn’t show you how to sweep the leg, but I already know how!” 

“No you don’t,” Aradia shook her head, eyes closed as she relaxed in the shade. “I’m the only one who practiced any moves, Uncle Clubs can hardly get Tavros and Sollux to fight because their costumes keep getting in the way.” 

It was true, Clubs had shown them how to throw the right kind of punches but they were now bogged down trying to work with Tavros’s cape, which was dragging behind him and getting waterlogged. Similarly, Sollux’s tinfoil limbs were getting heavy and soggy, and tearing whenever he pulled back to throw a punch. He was re-wrapping one arm while Club helped Tavros, bunching up the trail of his cape and using his pocket-knife to saw through the shower curtain. 

“I do so!” Karkat insisted, paying no attention to the foolishness in the pool-ring. “Dad showed me, he says it’s the best move because tall people get cocky and then you kick them over onto their asses and smack the smug off their mug!”

“But you’d never do that,” Said Hearts, Karkat’s shoulder angel. 

“What? No I--,” Karkat pulled in two directions again and then sat stiffly in the grass. “No, of course not. I keep saying, wrestling is stupid, we should all be inside not doing this.” 

“Exactly,” Aradia folded her arms behind her head, then bent one leg up and crossed the other over it. “So once I beat the snot out of Tavros and Sollux that championship belt will be all mine and you’ll all have to say I’m the Champion of the Super Summer Slam Splashdown Showdown.”

“You’re fixing to be the Queen of the Super Summer Slam Splashdown Showdown, huh MIss Priss?” Hearts asked. 

“And when I’m Queen I’m gonna rule with an iron fist!” Aradia opened her eyes with a fiery glint in them, waving her fist in the air and grinning maniacally. She softened with a giggle, still shaking her fist. “Everyone will have to watch Temple of Doom on repeat and go exploring with me.”

“Who let you watch Temple of Doom?” Hearts’s brows descended over his little eyes.

“Papa says it’s the funniest one.” Aradia looked back, not seeing what her Uncle Hearts was worried about. 

“You never said you were going to play one of the bad guys,” Karkat said softly, coming out of a daydream. “You’re not supposed to want to be evil, Aradia, especially when you’re the only one who learned any moves.” 

Aradia shrugged, resting her hands on her chest. “I like the bad guys the most, it’s like Uncle Hearts said, they’re the best characters. Plus it’s more fun to be evil, you get to kick more butt!”

Karkat looked back at the ground, then up at Tavros and Sollux in the pool-ring. It was bad, Sollux’s tinfoil was flaking off of his left and ring, unpeeling his arms as he tried a bodyslam that collided awkwardly with Tavros, who fell over like wet cardboard. They both landed flat on their faces, Sollux’s 3D glasses falling mushily into the pool followed by his real glasses. Tavros, pinned under Sollux, had to hold his breath until Sollux finally wobbled back to his feet, at which point Clubs came and wrested him up from the water. Tavros coughed loudly and rubbed his stomach, looking sick and sticking his tongue out, his cousin going to his hands and knees skimming his hands over the bottom of the pool for his glasses. 

“Total chumps,” Aradia said at Karkat’s shoulder. She sat up, steepling her fingers and grinning. “I can’t wait for my crowningation.”

“Actually it’s pronounced coroner-ration,” Hearts corrected her. 

“But you’re not gonna like, beat them really, really bad, right? That would be mean and you don’t need to do that to win.” Karkat looked at his sister, scared for his cousins. 

“Uh, duh, I’m a villain! I’m gonna rub their noses in the ring, that’s the fun part of wrestling!” She answered. 

“B-but earlier you said you liked Roman Reigns and he’s a good guy, didn’t you want to be a good guy?”

“No, I said I liked him because he’s so good at getting chokeslammed.” Hearts put a hand over his heart hearing his niece’s newfound love of wrestling. Seeing the next generation really get the beauty of the sport was touching enough to bring a tear to his eye. “You mean you wouldn’t want to do the chokeslam to him?” 

Aradia cocked her head and Karkat got up in a hurry. 

“No! I’d want to, like, hug him after he got chokeslammed because he’s a good guy, and good guys are supposed to win and that’s why you root for them because you see yourself in the good guys.” He looked anxiously from the ring where his cousins were still bumbling around to Clubs, who was watching them and rubbing his forehead. He had a concerned but also hopeless look on his face. Karkat chewed his lip and balled his fists together. 

“If you’re not gonna play fair I’ll-- I’ll--!” Aradia and Hearts both sat up, waiting for Karkat to deliver his next line. He turned from the ring to face them, his fat reddish face looking more sallow and stressed after watching his cousins failing to fight. The three of them stared at each other and then Karkat let out a loud, short squeak and sat back down, shoving his fingers back into the dirt and looking pointedly away from them. “Forget it, it’s so dumb like stupid and dumb and I’m not even going to do it because it’s not important and I’m so not even, like, at all interested.”

Hearts sat back, shaking his head, and Aradia put her hands up and shrugged. She looked confident and cool with a cloud of frizzy hair bouncing behind her as she stood back up. 

“I’m gonna go pick out something to wear for my big debut, I want to look good while I’m getting coroner-rated.” She made off to the costume station, digging through the box of old odds, ends and googaws.

Karkat pouted dismally at the ground and Hearts fished out a new beer. He cracked it and slurped the foam off the top, then laid back in his chaise and sighed heavily. 

“Y’know,” he said, waving his beer can with a tipsy lightness to his big arm, “Once she figures out her outfit we’re gonna start the fight. The boys are, uh, as trained as they’re gonna get. So if you were gonna get in on the Super Summer Slam Splashdown Showdown, I think you’d better do it quick.” 

“I’m not gonna join,” Karkat said, popping up from the ground and pacing in a tight circle next to his uncle’s chair. “I’m just, just, I’m going to go help coach them. So they don’t lose! And I don’t have to fight! Because I won’t, it’s so stupid!”

He didn’t stick around to fill Hearts in any more, jogging across the lawn and scrambling through the noodles into the ring. Karkat splashed over to his cousins, yelling. Clubs saw him coming and gave training the boys another shot, parting Tavros and Sollux from the clinch they’d been using to stay standing while they stumbled and slipped on the pool floor. He stood the boys back up and sighed, tapping his chin trying to think of a solution for the two hopeless cases.   
Hearts got up slowly from his chaise, taking his beer in two fingers and then a fresh can for Clubs and moseying over to the ring. He called Clubs over and passed him his beer, which Club gulped down gratefully. They talked over the noodles surrounding the ring. 

In the center of the ring Tavros and Sollux both were sitting hip deep in the water, relaxing after so much activity while Karkat grumbled overhead with a lecture.   
“C’mon you guys, what are you even doing? You have to learn how to fight or you’re totally gonna get your asses kicked. I mean, it’s not so hard to do it’s just stupid, dumb wrestling, all you have to do is bodyslam her and Aradia will go down. She’s not any bigger than us but if you don’t figure this out we’re going to have to watch Temple of Doom all the time and there’s this really, really gross scene where someone gets their heart ripped out and then she’s gonna make us go dumpster diving because she thinks they’re like, ‘urban archaeological gold mines’ just because the Roman stuff she read about was found in an old trash dump in Rome. Are you even listening, this is going to be a bloodbath if you don’t start fighting good!”  
“But I don’t like wrestling for the fighting anyway,” Tavros said, putting his clip on nose ring back in after Uncle Clubs told him to pocket it while they fought. “I just wanted to make characters together and do our intros. Like I’m gonna be Tavrio Nobell, a minotaur wizard who throws dice that decide the fates of men!” 

He picked up the edge of his cloak, pulling it around him so the jagged hem of the shower curtain sliced through the water. In his other hand he spun his wet dice-chucks, splashing himself in the face. Tavros threw his fuzzy dice at Karkat, missing wide by a mile and sending them clean out of the ring. 

“Oh, dangit,” Tavros got up and trotted after them awkwardly, his clothes wet and heavy as he bounced across the pool. 

“I’ll fight,” Sollux said, patching his joints with duct tape now that he had worn through all his tinfoil. What little of it remained on him was peeling off, waterlogged, so he was securing it with the tape. “But I don’t see what’s so bad about dumpster diving, me and Aradia went the other day and we found a whole TV set Dad and I are fixing.” 

He adjusted his glasses, which he’d taped the plastic lenses from his ruined 3D glasses to. “Plus, Tavros is right, making your character is more fun. Y’wanna hear mine?”

“You guys aren’t making any sense, it’s gonna be so smelly in that dumpster we’ll never unsmell it. God, no one gets it…” Karkat tugged on his hair. “And yeah, duh I want to hear.”

“Silicon Crackler,” Sollux pulled his bomb deely boppers and sent them springing back and forth from his head, while he assumed a Power Ranger post with his silver limbs shining. “I’m a robot who’s also a bomb and my finishing move is a big explosion.” 

“Okey, let me see that,” Karkat steadied his feet on the floor of the pool, squaring his shoulders to get ready for Sollux’s finisher. 

“Uh, uh, uh, okey here it comes,” Sollux took a few steps back, his brain scrambling for a move behind his blue and red lenses. He squared up, mimicking Karkat, then put his arms all the way out and ran at his cousin, leaping into a bodyslam. “Explosion!” 

Sollux jumped several feet too soon and fully belly flopped in front of Karkat, throwing up a wave when he connected from the hard ground under the pool. Karkat sighed and wiped water from his face, looking down at Sollux while Tavros came trotting back with his dice. 

“Well, maybe if you could make the wave bigger it would knock her over,” Karkat tried to come up with something they could do to fix this. 

“Okey, boys, maybe we try something new here.” Clubs came back over from where he’d been talking with Hearts. “Karkat and me will show you how to do a hit and then you practice on each other, okey?” 

Tavros and Sollux nodded. Clubs started coaching them, playing patsy to Karkat while they worked through how to do a proper bodyslam and how to fall to the mat without taking a nose dive every time. 

Hearts wandered over to Aradia, coming up to her as she was coiling a bungee cord around her arms. It had no hooks on either end, making it an ideal whip for her character to carry slung on her hip. She looked up as her uncle came over and put a big hand on her puffy head. 

“You really know how to work your brother, huh?” He said with a grin. 

“It’s dumb that he’s still sad,” Aradia nodded his hand off and started tying one end of the bungee cord around her waist so it wouldn’t fall off during a fight. “I mean Dad needs to apologize but Karkat being mad all day just makes me sad. Or mad, kind of both. He does this to himself, I can’t stand it.” 

She coiled the cord over itself on one hip, smiling gleefully at her own work. Hearts sat down in the grass with a heavy sigh, putting his beer on the ground and reaching into the box of stuff between them. 

“Well I think it’s real nice that you broke him out of it.” He said, fishing out one of his old borsalino hats. It was a little worn at the edges and had turned from a rich, deep red to a dusty brown, its red band paling to a shiny umber. Aradia’s eyes lit up at the find and Hearts placed the hat lovingly on her head, where she grabbed it and held it down by its wide brim eagerly. “You’re not much of a villain, huh?”

“What?!” Aradia squeaked with rage, lifting the hat up and bouncing on her feet. “I’m so a villain! I’m the most villainous villain, I’m Auburn Montana, master explorer and artifacts thief!” 

She posed with her arms flexing, then remembered her whip and fumblingly pulled the loose end from the coil, pinching it between her fingers and waving it in Hearts’s face.

“I break into tombs and steal cursed stuff and that’s why I can control snakes. Sssss!” She hissed at him with the rope and Hearts laughed and put his hands up. 

“Oh no! Geez, I thought Indy’s one weakness  _ was _ snakes.” He said. 

“It is,” Aradia nodded, coiling her snake whip again. “But Auburn Montana is also a witch, kind of, so her whip is enchanted and badass.” 

“I’ll say.” Hearts sat back and watched Clubs and Karkat sparring while Sollux and Tavros chitchatted about their wrestling personas. Aradia started making herself a vest out of brown paper bags and Hearts looked over at her cloud of black hair. He sipped his beer and warned her. “Before you Papa gets home I’m gonna have to braid that hair again. You don’t want to incur his wrath after he’s been in sensitivity class all day.”

Aradia blew a raspberry as she started stapling the two halves of her vest together. 

“Who’s afraid of Papa? He’s all talk, just a bunch of hot air and hair cream.” 

Hearts scoffed at that and was glad to hear her say it. Of all of them, the longest road to parenthood had been Droog’s. 

“Alright, Miss Priss, if you say so. But I know he’s got hands of steel when he braids so you decide if it’s worth the risk.” 

Aradia paused and touched her hair. Hearts was right, for all that he was an excellent braider Droog was not afraid to nearly pull her hair out when he got into one of his more complex patterns. 

“Okey, sure,” She said, going back to stapling. “But only after I win the Championship.” 

“Oh of course,” Hearts nodded peaceably. “We gotta decide the champ first.”

“Anyway I bet Papa is doing fine in class,” Aradia shrugged on her vest, looking over her handiwork. “How hard is it to just be nice once in a while?” 


	6. Social Awareness and Skill

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The class struggles to pass while Slick and Droog talk out the situation with Karkat.

* * *

Slick and Droog revelled in getting to shout down whatever was left of the Felts’ self esteem, but three minutes was far too little for either of them. Their vitrial only rose with each participant, so that when Moose finally called an end to the Self-Management exercise they were both steaming a little and Droog was back to smoking like a chimney. 

Moose had the class pair up, each with their nearest crewmen, and turn their desks to face one another. As Slick and Droog shimmied their desks around they looked into one another’s faces and saw they’d both given up the fun of insulting their rivals for real anger that things couldn’t escalate any further. 

Droog looked sallow and grey, all the color in his face washing out in favor of the burning white and blood red of his eyes. It was a face Slick knew well, and one that turned him on in a way that made him not want to touch Droog with a ten foot pole. Slick was on the other side of the spectrum and alive with color, disheveled from rubbing his face and tugging his hair and snarling so that his angry little laugh lines stood out in red and black around his mouth, reminding Droog of a cute, little gremlin from a fairytale. 

They sat across from each other slowly cooling off while the Felts paired off and scooted their desks around. The noise of the desks scraping the floor was grating and Droog muttered to Slick over the racket. 

“Right outside the garage.” He assured Slick, nodding at his own idea with his fierce eyes burning cold. “A hundred and one feet from the garage.”

Slick nodded then squinted, mulling over something. He shook the thought out of his head and then looked back at his husband. “Tonight you oughta get a hot bath and a bottle of wine and put on some Sting.” 

Droog didn’t balk at the idea but his face knotted loosely in confusion. 

“Why? It’ll be plenty relaxing to flatten them with the car.”

“I think there’s something else we gotta do before we go home.” Slick tossed his head and waggled his jaw and fought it but this was a thought he couldn’t shake. He wanted nothing more than to run back and forth over Crowbar until he was a flat, gooey pancake but there was something else on the docket tonight that Slick was more and more aware he couldn’t duck. 

“What’s that?” Droog plainly didn’t like the idea already.

“I think maybe if there’s, y’know, time, and the traffic’s not bad and we get out of here kind of early we should go over to the--” 

“Everybody, let’s get some eyes up here.” Moose called the room to attention and Slick looked glad to shut up, turning to the front of class like a bonafide good student. A new slide shone on the projection screen. 

**Activity 3**

**Social Awareness:** Perceiving what others are thinking and feeling. Listening and observing are key skills.

Pair up with a teammate and decision emotional wellbeing, thoughts and feelings through observational statements and active listening. 

“Now boys, I gotta say I’m real proud of youse,” Moose spoke warmly to the class, coiling his rope back up and dumping it inside his desk. “We’re a lot closer to done than you’d think and I’m already seeing a lot of progress in this room.” 

He cast a look right at Slick with a genuine and boyish smile that first turned Slick red then green then red again. Slick slapped his hand on his desk so hard the hit vibrated painfully up his arm and he used to pain, spitting with as much venom as his little body could produce. 

“Ride me! If you were anybody else I swear to god I’d slit that smile right off your face, wipe the smug off your ugly mug!” He was aware that he was snarling like an angry dog, and that Droog was smiling and settling in his seat while he enjoyed the show. 

“Like I said before, lots of love in here,” Moose took the threat in stride and then indicated the PowerPoint behind him. “Alright, now here we are at step #3. Social Awareness. I’m happy to say you all know plenty about cultural awareness, like we said already, but now we’re gonna work on something a little different. Social Awareness has everything to do with how you open yourself to others and what they broadcast back.”

The room grumbled, not a soul in any of the desks interested in being a more open and caring person, except maybe Doze who had made it to the third and final page of his test. Droog checked his watch and Slick eyed the clock over the projection screen, wondering how much longer Moose would hold them since they were only through two of his four steps and had burnt up six of the eight hours the seminar was supposed to last. 

“I hear you, I hear you,” Moose put up his big hands and tamped down their grouchy sounds. “I get it, us gangsters ain’t the most open guys. How can we be, I mean we’re criminals after all, you can’t be a real good crook if you go around spilling your guts to every guy you meet off the street. That’s why we’re pairing up with our teammates, and what I want to see here is everyone using what does come naturally to a gangster.”

Slick leaned his chin in his hand and looked over at Droog, reading a little more of their daydream of mulching Moose and turning him into a bed for tomatoes and habanero peppers. 

“We’re all naturally observant people, it’s a skill we’ve all honed to tell who’s lying, who’s an undercover cop, if some nosy detective remembered to wear their gun today. It’s one of the most versatile skills we’ve got. We’re gonna combine our observant eyes with our active listening skills and each pair of you will take turns telling one another what you perceive about each other’s emotional state and wellbeing.”

Moose paused and looked over the disgruntled faces of his students for any cluelessness. “Now we all know what active listening is, right?”

“Yes,” The class groaned.   
“Let me hear a definition.” Moose pointed to Droog, who unfolded his hard, narrow arms from his chest and huffed exhaustively. 

“Active listening is when you focus on what someone tells you and say it back to them deliberately, to show you heard it.” He droned, craving penne alla vodka con Moose. 

“Close enough. Active listening means focusing on what your partner says and responding to it with the same language to show you are fully concentrating and answering instead of passively listening.”

“That’s exactly what I said.” Droog grumbled impassively, right on Moose’s heels.

“Sure,” Moose let it ride. “Now I’ll be listening for lots of clear communication, we’ll start off with observations and I want to hear ‘I’ statements in our responses. This is all about teamwork and knowing your partner, so remember this is an exercise in opening up to each other to make your team stronger.” 

The students turned to their partners and Slick and Droog looked at each other’s weary faces. 

“You remember ambulance guy?” Droog spoke low and sternly, his voice reaching Slick despite his hush and the beginnings of conversation bubbling from the pairs of Felts. “I have his number. He can get Moose to the house by the time we pull the woodchipper out of the shed.”

Slick let the idea warm him, taking a moment with his eye closed to savor the image of an arch of blood coming out of the woodchipper, one of Moose’s ankles being chewed up in its mouth. Then he shook his head slowly and sadly, looking at Droog. 

“No, the kids might see it. Or worse, eat some of the dirt while they’re outside playing.”

“Aradia doesn’t eat dirt.” Droog said snipily. “Your son is the dirt eater in the family, because you tell him--”

“I mean my kid’s not gonna act prissy about food, I always tell him--” Slick cut in as soon as Karkat as accused, so that the two of them spoke together. 

“‘You gotta eat a pound of dirt before you die.’”

“Yeah!” Finally Droog agreed with him. Slick’s brain started processing the sentence his husband had just told him, then he sneered and put his hands up. “Okey, okey, ride me. Either way, it’d be stupid to chop him at home. It’d lead right to us.”

“Let me dream a little while, would you?” Droog rubbed his temples with his ringed fingers. Slick scowled and looked away only to see Moose watching the two of them. He straightened up in his seat and cleared his throat, nodded to Droog. 

“Let’s just get it over with, this is an easy one since we don’t have to deal with all the green douchebags.” Droog hummed and came out of his dream, fixing his mouth and raising his eyebrows at Slick. 

“Alright. Tell me what I’m broadcasting.” He sat slumped in his seat, arms crossed, ankles crossed, with his eyes fixed in a cool stare and his mouth set a little pursed with no real emotion. Slick let out toothy breath and squinted at Droog, knowing he was being fucked with now that his husband had turned into a statue. 

“Sure, fancy pants. You’re broadcasting that you think I’m being soft when I’m just trying to get us through this god damn class so we can keep our fucking family plan. Suddenly I’m soft for being fucking responsible with our fucking kids, is that right?” He demanded.

Droog raised a hand. 

“Whoa, whoa. _You_ ’re the responsible parent? When did this happen? Before or after you broke your son’s expensive Gameboy?” He turned his hand palm up and then palm down, giving Slick his options. 

“Wh-when I…” Slick returned to his unshakable thought and realized he’d never said it. “I was gonna say we can’t wallop these dicks in the parking lot because we need to go to the mall.”

“The mall?” Droog scowled dreadfully, he hated the mall. His favorite time to go was in the dead of night, when he could break in and peruse the dark shops unmolested by his fellow man. “Why on Earth would we go to the mall?” 

“I have to go buy him a new fucking Gameboy so he’ll finally shut up.” Slick leered at his desk, crossing his twiggy arms and clasping his mis-matched hands on his sinewy biceps. “You can sit in the car and sulk if you want, but you’re just gonna end up soupy out there.” 

Droog sighed and rolled his eyes, putting his palm up again, fingers heavenward. 

“Is that all?” He asked, eyes waiting for something Slick refused to stop chewing on. 

“What the hell do you want from me, a kiss on the cheek and my fist up your ass?” Slick snarled at his husband.

“Heh, yeah Droog is that what you’re into?” Crowbar elbowed into their conversation and they both turned on him, eyes wild.

“Shut the fuck up, Crowbar!”

“You want to see how far that crowbar will reach inside you?”

“Augh, Jesus, learn to take a joke.” Crowbar receded. 

They turned back to one another. 

“What?” Slick jabbed his sharp chin at Droog. “What am I missing, old man?” 

Droog pursed his lips and peered back at Slick, tilting his head heavily into his palm. The hard line in his cheek Slick had admired when they were young was aging to become a thin jowl. He didn’t mind the change, if anything it made it cute to think that a part of Droog’s notorious snarl was now pinchably soft. 

“What do you think of that? Even I can see it and yet you still won’t say it. Since when do I have to spoon feed you what you’re supposed to do?”

Slick felt his upper lip twitch over his teeth, his eye settling on Droog’s cold grey face. 

“I know what to do,” Slick didn’t appreciate his husband’s condescension. He spoke through his teeth with a growing, bitter urgency. “That’s why we’re going to the mall, Droog.”

“Now do you see here what we mean about language?” Moose leaning in, taking a knee beside their desks and looking between the two of them. Up close his face was more weather beaten and mature, a rosy olive color with the sharp black eyes and pug nose of a cardshark. They glinted from Slick to Droog. “You two have worked yourselves into a loop by avoiding what each other is saying.” 

Slick breathed all the air in his lungs out in one rattling sigh, rubbing his eye and socket and knowing that an electrode couldn’t be _this_ bad. He finally looked up again and found Droog leaning into his hand, his fingers peeling back one eyelid while the other side of his face seemed to melt into miserable olive wax. 

“Ay--Droog!” Slick sprang up and snapped his fingers in Droog’s face. “Do you smell burnt toast? Talk to me!”  
“Noo.” Droog’s other eye opened, showing his usual sharp stare. He drew in a breath and his skin tightened around his skull again. “It’s not that.” 

“Jesus, don’t scare me like that.” Slick gripped the front of his chest with his metal hand, letting out a breath. They both turned to face Moose, who met their glares with cool indifference. He poked his chin at Droog and spoke like he was passing out Droog’s hand for the next round of Blackjack. “Now Droog. What is it you see that Slick refuses to talk about?”

Droog looked at Slick and telepathically uttered ‘Look what you’ve done.’ Then he spoke aloud. 

“If you would just apologize to Karkat we would be done with this already.” He gave Slick a tired stare, like he was running out of the will to be angry about this. 

“I’m trying to apologize! How is that not clear? I’ll buy him the Gameboy and he’ll forgive me and we’ll be done. He’s whole again, he stops complaining--!”

“Aht! Slick, c’mon. Let’s have some active listening here.” Moose interjected. “Droog didn’t say anything about buying that Gameboy. There’s another part you’re ducking. What do I keep saying? Don’t be afraid to be vulnerable.” 

Slick felt his face twitching and he looked down, only to find his hands scratching at his desk while rage bubbled up through his body. He wrenched his hands from the desk’s top and put his arms out, his eye wide and shining bright. 

“I know it’s a bad idea but I don’t fucking care, I’m going to fucking kill you Moose. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life. Real soon.” His breathing was erratic and seeing Droog deflate and hunch in his seat didn’t help. 

Moose looked at Slick evenly, then folded his brow down over his eyes and set his jaw, pondering the threat before he shrugged and opened his pink face again. “Yeah, okey. But you won’t do it yet, so here’s your hand.” 

He slapped his paw on Slick’s desk, making a solid smack that rattled his seat. “What part of this apology are you afraid of?”

“I’m not afraid I’m just--Y’know it’s not always--”

“Slick!” Moose insisted. 

“Out with it, already.” Droog shot at him. 

Slick huffed and hunched over his desk. 

“How’m I supposed to apologize for being a shitty dad?” Slick asked them. He looked at Moose. “You’re feelingsy. You tell me.”

“You’re not a bad father, Slick, you just did a bad thing. Bad parents don’t beat themselves up about that. Y’know, just start by saying what you did was wrong and that you won’t do it again. Give him a heartfelt apology, make him feel heard and ask if there’s anything else that you can do for him. Your boy will get it if you’re open about wanting to understand his feelings and then--”

“Too feelingsy, Droog?”

“You say ‘Sorry.’ and then give him the new toy.” Droog had a way of paring things down just right with Slick. 

He sucked his teeth and looked away, then back at Moose. 

“So what, are you gonna flunk us because we’re not being Socially Aware enough? Too busy being fucking parents to our kids?” He spun his hands in the air, very done with all of this.

“I told you boys to use your active listening and work on your emotional wellbeing,” Moose was smiling at the two of them with the dopey, honey-high look of a grizzly bear. He lifted his hand from Slick’s desk. “And I bet you feel a lot better after that, huh? Admitting you need help is always the first step to getting better.” 

Slick blew a dismal raspberry. 

“Keep up the good work, boys.” Moose stood up and moved on to the next pair. 

Slick shook his whole body, trying to get every skin cell that Moose might’ve breathed on off him. Droog took out his cigarettes and helped himself to a fresh one. 

“S’like we fought but we didn’t fight.” Slick said once he was done shuddering, his nose wrinkling uneasily at the thought. “I don’t like it.”

“Feels dirty.” Droog agreed, tucking his lighter away. “What’s the point of all that if there’s no fight?”

Slick pointed at him, glad to hear his thoughts aloud. 

“Why bother, right? Hell, if you want we could go a couple rounds in the parking lot?” It had been a while since they sparred, they’d rarely kept the habit up with the kids around. Droog shook his head no. 

“We’re busy enough as it is.” He was quiet for a moment, then. “Sorry about breaking your balls.”

Slick frowned, poking his lips out and sighing. 

“You’re alright. I guess I kind of deserved it.” He drummed his metal fingers on the desk, enjoying the tapping noise and the vibrations up his metal arm. “Sorry I took this long.”

Droog nodded, taking his cigarette from his mouth and polluting the air behind him, sending a cloud over the choke Itchy and Die.   
“So what’re you going to say?” He asked. Slick put his hands up, nowhere near an answer. 

“Start with here you go and get to sorry?” He gave Droog his full blueprint for the apology. 

“You should tell him you gave up fighting these pricks to get him the new Gameboy.” Droog thumbed behind him at the rest of the class. “He’s got your thrill for a fight, after all.”

“Y’think he’d like that? It’s not too sappy?” Slick squinted, unsure. “After his speech at dinner I’m not sure. He was real anti-fighting last night.”

“Is that what the speech was about?” Droog cocked his head, trying to remember it through Slick. 

“How hard is it to listen once in a while, eh? C’mon, old man, everyone’s gonna think your ears are going.”

Droog gave a short, swift wave of both hands, casting others’ thoughts away from him. Slick rolled his eye and pinched his lips closed so Droog wouldn’t catch him smiling at his super cool indifference. They had a moment to sit and enjoy a silence together before Moose took his place at the head of the class again. 

“Alright boys, I’ve seen some excellent work all around.” He gave Slick and Droog the most significant of the nods he offered to the class and they both groaned painfully. “And this brings us to our fourth and final step.” 

A new slide came up and everyone eyed the tiny text at the bottom that read ‘9/10’, counting down the last of the presentation.

**Activity 4**

**Social Skill:** Managing interactions with others, relationship management and handling conflict. Noting the impact of stress on relationships.

Give a personal example of how skills built in class will help you overcome conflict in the future.

“Social Skill is the one thing we’ve been working up to all day. It’s why you were all challenged to take this class in the presence of your rivals, and it’s what every activity we’ve done is decided to help you understand. What we’ve learned today are all the different facets that go into real social skill, and now that you’re familiar with them you can start practicing to hone that skill sharper and sharper.”  
Die raised his head. 

“Yes?”

“Can we move our desks back?” He said, tired of Itchy’s restless kicking feet knocking into his long, crossed legs. 

“Yeah, of course,” Moose chuckled and waited through the racket of desks moving to continue his final exercise. 

As they settled back into their seats Slick looked at Droog and tapped his wrist. Droog checked his watch and mutter. 

“There’s only half an hour left.” Slick tried to stay hopeful but he couldn’t imagine what Moose had cooked up for them now. If it was anything like the other exercises they’d be here for another three hours barking at each other. 

“I know it sounds scary,” Moose pet the anxious air in the room with a big hand. “One final exercise to rule them all. But don’t get psyched out, you all made it this far and I’ll tell you now, I don’t think we’re gonna have a single person drop and take Ms. Fran’s class.”   
Droog and Slick exchanged impressed looks, the dour atmosphere of the room lifting. 

“The last exercise is gonna be a simple one. I’m gonna go around to each of you and you’ll tell me what you learned today that you can use to face conflict productively outside of class. We’ll just start, right to left.”

Moose pointed to Die, who sat up and twisted his thin lips back and forth, trying to find the right shape for his answer. He finally got it, sitting up with his bony hands spread out in front of him on his desk. 

“Okey, uh, what’d I learn that I can use outside of class? I guess active listening and self-management will come in pretty handy around the manor, we got a lot of people to weigh in on decisions and I know a lot of us don’t always get heard. Like me and Doze and Eggs and Biscuits especially. But with active listening I bet we could talk Doc and Lord English into decisions that would help everybody, not just them and Snowman and Crowbar.”

From the back of the room Crowbar scoffed, his legs crossed over the top of his desk with his ass sticking out underneath. Sitting like this had pinned him into the chair again, and so he had to scrunch all the way down with his head almost tucked between his knees to still fit in his seat. 

Die shot a look back at him. 

“Yeah, and it’d make a big difference too, a little inter-organization communication would do wonders, I mean half the house doesn’t even remember the other half’s names, there’s no recognition of what we do for the team and really it wouldn’t kill you to be a little considerate but noo, that’s not what the Doctor and Lord English want. Or so _some people_ say.”

“Hey Die, how about you active listen to this,” Crowbar squeezed awkwardly up in his seat, a green blush growing over his face either from public embarrassment or from the strain of sitting wrong all day. As he sat up he spoke with a heightening, squeaking urgency. “Don’t air your dirty laundry right in front of _them!_ ”

Slick and Droog shared a look, glad that even when they were messy bitches in public they weren’t this messy.

“Keep going, Die.” Droog turned to him. 

“Yeah, don’t let Nimrod tell you what to do.” Slick poked his head up and nodded at Die. 

“Alright, instigators, settle down. Die, active listening and self-management.” Moose pinched one and then the other between his fingers, counting off Die’s observations. He kept things moving before his students fell into disarray for what must be the fourth or fifth time today. “Droog, you’re next up.”

Droog took a second to pluck the cigarette from his mouth and throw it on the floor, where a graveyard of its brothers and sisters waited.

“And you know you’re gonna have to sweep that up, right?” Moose added. Polluting his classroom to keep calm was one thing but he wouldn’t leave that kind of mess for the cleaning staff to deal with. 

Droog’s eyes were red and cold as he hissed out one last cloud of smoke, peering through it at Moose and thinking of his garden. 

“Social Awareness.” He said with effort, not elaborating further. 

Moose raised his eyebrows and opened his hands slowly, smiling placidly at the top contender for Worst Student of the Day. Droog scowled sourly and huffed his way to an answer.

“I’ll use it to tell when Slick is about to blow his top.” He spoke dully, nodding his head at his husband who took the comment with only a mild grimace. 

“Good enough,” Moose moved on, leaving Die with his mouth agape after working so hard on his answer. Moose assured the room: “Remember, Social Skill is all about seeing what needs to be done in a social situation and doing it for the betterment of everyone involved. Giving the answer your teacher wants to hear is a part of that.”

While the rest of the room felt the weight of finishing class easing from their shoulders Slick was busy drawing on the glossy surface of his desk with one finger. He’d written the word ‘sorry’ a few times to get used to seeing it but didn’t feel any clearer about what he was supposed to tell Karkat than he had before. 

“Slick,” Moose moved on to him. “You look like you’re real deep in thought over there. Wanna tell us what you’re chewing over?”

Slick let out a creaking sigh, his ass numb from sitting all day, his stomach empty and starting to feel queasy from the smoke and the feelings and the Felt all around him. What he wouldn’t give to step back into yesterday and slap himself, give the unbroken Gameboy back to his son and call it a day. He could take the seminar just fine, and leave all these morons out of his family’s business. But life was never that easy, most of the time you were getting your arm ripped off or throwing a fit at your kid’s toy or going to a Union required class with a bunch of assholes. He tried to come up with a lame answer to match Droog’s and knew without saying it that Moose wouldn’t accept anything but the one thing it had taken Slick all day to put together. 

“I gotta apologize to my kid.” He said tiredly, running out of steam as it was. If the Felt wanted to think he was soft then fine, let them think what they wanted. They were insignificant idiots anyway. “I guess that’s what? Social Skill? Doesn’t matter, you got what you wanted. I’ll say sorry and get him a new Gameboy and that’ll be that.”  
Moose nodded, pursing his lips and giving Slick a delicate, proud smile that made his stomach turn. 

“I’ll take it. That’s good work, Slick. I knew you’d make it through. And remember, you can be vulnerable and honest with your apology, make your boy feel heard and loved.”

“Ride me,” He said, deflating into an apathetic slump. Slick looked over at Droog, who was tallying his cigarette butts to see if he could get away with just kicking them around the floor and implicating the whole class instead of sweeping them up himself. Droog looked back at him after a moment, raising his eyebrows and watching Slick. Behind them Crowbar took his time answering, his voice angling at Die as he held forth about personal responsibility to the team. Slick rubbed his face and sighed, pushing his chin into his palm and looked back at Droog, ready to get home and call it a night. 

Droog looked like he was thinking something over, an odd look for a man so set in his ways. He pushed his chin at Slick, seeing how worn out his husband was at the mention of his apology, much less the act itself. 

“You’ll do fine.” He said, giving Slick the most reassuring pep talk of their marriage. Slick sat up, touched, and then leaned against his desk with one elbow and spoke.

“Hey Nimrod how about you cut to the chase and spit it out already, we’re tired of hearing that big mouth of yours.”

Crowbar bristled, turning his glare from Die to Slick and almost tipping himself over when he wiggled around to put both feet on the floor. 

“You wanna make something of this, you one eyed weasel?” 

Slick sat backwards in his seat, looking Crowbar over slowly and then turned and settled back against his chair. 

“Nah. S’not worth it.”

Moose put a hand over his broad chest and smiled so warmly that the rays coming off his face had Slick squinting. The back row rattled off their answers and Slick went back to writing on his desk with his finger. 

‘Here’s Gameboy, sorry, forgive me.’

Slick balled his fist and rubbed out the apology, starting again.

‘Sorry I was asshole. Here’s Gameboy’

‘Fucking Gameboy, sorry.’

“That’s the one.” Droog reached over and tapped next to Slick’s writing. Behind him Itchy finished nattering about accountability.

“Y’think? Simple, right? Kind of elegant.” Slick tilted his head from side to side, taking in the shape of the words. 

“That’s good work boys, give yourselves a round of applause. You all made it through!” Moose started clapping for them and the room picked it up with a few lukewarm claps. The Felt glanced around at each other, while Droog creaked out of his seat almost immediately and Slick swung his little legs down, his shoes rapping on the floor. Moose put up a hand as Droog reached the door, shuffling in his desk for something. “Whoa, hang on. You’re not out yet, Droog.”

Moose pulled out a handful of glossy form with olive branches framing the same set of calligraphy over and over, a shiny black seal stamped on the bottom of each page. 

“It wouldn’t be the Organized Criminals’ Union without paperwork,” Moose said in a laugh, leafing through the certificates for Droog’s. He pulled it out and put it on his desk, just missing Droog’s hand as he snatched for it. “You’ll get yours once you sweep up your desk.”

Slick caught a glimpse of the look of pure hatred on Droog’s face before a swarm of green bodies cut off his view. He stalked over to the door, stepping in the ashes around Droog’s desk and smearing them across the back of Crowbar’s leg when he reached the pile up at the door. 

“Hey!” Crowbar turned and snarled at him, wiping the black smudge from his green pantleg. 

“Oops,” Slick smudged him some more, just missing a chance to squash Crowbar’s hand under his shoe. 

“Boys, c’mon, get out the door at least.” Moose called over the crowd at the door and spoiled Slick’s fun, then went back to handing out the certificates. Slick leered at Crowbar, who sneered and turned away, adjusting the big padded shoulders of his jacket and standing up straight. They all jostled forward as Quarters lumbered out into the hall, and Slick turned his apology around in his head. 

“Tell your boy you love him…” A dim, lulling voice spoke right behind Slick, making him start and jump a few inches in the air. He spun around, staggering a little and almost falling into Doze. The guy’s round green face tilted slowly, and he spoke again with the unhurried, unemotional tone of a sleepwalker. “Then do better… That’s the key to any good apology…”

Slick balked, unable to come up with a response as Doze inched passed him. In lieu of words Slick pushed him back about a foot, then shoved in front of Doze and stalked out into the hall once he grabbed his certificate.

“Really good work today, Slick.” Moose said after him, giving Slick a thumbs up through the open door. 

“Ride me,” Slick snapped, not looking at the big feelingsy idiot as he faced Itchy, Die, Crowbar and Quarters in the hall. They were moving away, leaving Doze in their dust, but none of them could resist an opportunity to give Slick the stink-eye as they walked down the hall. Slick grabbed his crotch in response, stuck waiting while Droog tidied up his desk. He huffed and leaned against the tiled wall, chewing his lips. His good eye was turned to the classroom, where Moose leaned inside the door frame and looked like he had something else to say. Moose was handed a shuffle of papers and Doze trucked along centimeter by centimeter out the door. 

“I’m sure you did great, Doze,” Moose said, skimming his test and already seeing plenty of right answers. “Sorry it took this long to make the time for you.”

“It’s okey...” Doze shuffled steadily through the door, Droog stuck right behind him boiling mad at being stimmeyed and left the last one in Moose’s class. He made it all the way into the hall and his round face turned to Slick, even as Droog pushed passed him and crumpled his certificate in one brittle hand. “Remember Slick… Do better and come from a place of love…”

“That’s exactly right.” Moose leaned into the hall after them, nodding at Doze’s advice. “You’ll do great, Slick.”

“Fuck off, all of you!” Slick and Droog were already speed walking down the hall, racing one another to be the furthest from class. They made it to the elevators and waited for the box to raise up from the lobby. Slick shoved his certificate in his pocket and Droog uncrumpled his and held it up to the light to check for watermarks. 

“It’s official.” He decided as the elevator doors opened. “We passed, no more sensitivity training until next year.”

Slick sighed, mostly a wheeze as they stepped into the box and rode down. 

“Whoop-de-fucking-doo,” Slick made a little circle in the air with one finger, but breathed a sigh of relief anyway. They walked out into the lobby and heard laughter shimmering from the front desk. 

Slick squinted, recognizing the voice behind the laugh, and then another laugh danced up from the desk, louder and bolder from Alice the receptionist. They came around the corner to find Alice, Fran and Snowman triangulated around the front desk, Snowman leaning her long ebony arms in long ebony evening gloves against the desk’s top. Fran was the one with the twinkling laugh, her face a deep blush as Snowman turned a cool, regal smile on her and Alice alike. 

“So the moral of the story is: if you want it to stay sunk tie a weight to it.” All three of them laughed, Snowman’s voice low and purring. She touched the end of her chin with one elegant hand and ran her eyes up and down Fran and Alice, smiling slowly again. “You know, you two make a lovely pair. I could listen to that laugh all night.” 

Fran blushed and Alice leaned across the desk to be close to her, taking her arm and returning Snowman’s gaze with a bright red smile. 

“We’re a package deal,” She winked, giving Fran a reassuring squeeze and touching her cheek. “But we happen to be free tonight, right Franny?” 

Fran smiled and pushed a lock of hair back behind her ear, nodded to Alice and then turning her best side to Snowman. Her voice was warm and low. 

“That’s right.”

“Lovely,” Snowman purred back, then paused and cast a look over her statue-esque shoulder.

Slick’s back hurt from bringing his shoulders higher and higher until his head was sunk between them. Snowman looked over at him, finding a scrunched, angry little man, and turned just enough to face him. Her body stayed turned towards the other ladies.

“Hello, Spades.” Her voice froze over. She tilted her head on her swan’s neck and turned back to Fran and Alice, giving Slick a view of a shiny wave of black velvet covering her back. “Goodbye, Spades.”

“Whatever.” Slick balled his fists and hunched down the hall to the parking lot. Droog kept pace next to him, straightening up and tightening his tie. 

“She’s too tall for you anyway.” Droog assured him, 5 foot 10 to Snowman’s 6 feet.

“Yeah, yeah. You’re right.” Slick checked his pockets while Droog fished for his keys. “C’mon, let’s get out of here.”

“Amen.” Droog nodded, fetching his keys and leading them to the car.


	7. Main Event

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Super Summer Slam Splashdown Showdown swings into action and Slick shows what he learned in class.

* * *

The straws were drawn, the costumes were on, and Hearts and Clubs had pulled their lounge chairs up to the side of the pool. Hearts had the garden hose on with his thumb over it, so a spray of cool water rained down on the ring where the kids waited at either side. Karkat, the sole exclusion from the Super Summer Slam Splashdown Showdown, sat picking at the grass between his uncles’ seats, eyeing Tavros and Sollux on one side of the ring and Aradia standing on the other side. She was leering at them through the ropes, stretching her bungee cord threateningly while Sollux taped his costume back together and Tavros tried to salvage his soggy horns.

“Alright,” Clubs had a fresh beer in hand as he played ref, his wet hair slicked back and his towel dripping around his neck. He put out both hands, beckoning a fighter from either side into the ring. Aradia ducked deftly under the pool noodles while Sollux climbed in and shimmied on his belly through them. “Welcome one and all to the first ever Super Summer Slam Splashdown Showdown!”  
The kids and Hearts cheered and clapped, Karkat taking up the only quiet spot in the yard. Clubs cupped his hands around his mouth and made a cheering sound to add to the ruckus. He paused as the others died down, took a slug from his beer and then continued. “Today we bring you live to the Rubber Ring, where our contenders will battle it out for the title of Super Summer Slam Splashdown Showdown Champion!”

The contenders went wild and Clubs bounced to the edge of the ring, leaning against the pool noodles where they were tied across the back of one flamingo. 

“Our first bout will decide the challenger for the Splashdown Belt, Auburn Montana versus Silicon Crackler!”

He ducked under the noodles and took his place next to Hearts, grateful to be off his feet and near the cooler. Hearts swished the hose back and forth, making a cheery shower over the pool while the kids posed. 

Aradia wore her hat low over her face, twirling her bungee cord whip and grinning as she aimed at Sollux. With a splash she slid on both knees through the water, sending a wave splashing across to her cousin along with her hat. She rolled over on her belly and snatched the hat back, bouncing to her feet. 

“You’re up against the best explorer-thief in the world!” She announced, putting the hat back on her wet head. “You’re about to fizzle out, Silicon!”

The wave had bogged down Sollux’s foiled legs and he took a minute to shake the water out of them before trying out his intro. “That was really good, Aradia, but you ruined my legs.”

“Oh come on, it’s just water. And I’m not Aradia, I’m Auburn Montana!”

“Right, and I’m--” Sollux dropped into a wide stance and shook his head violently, his deely boppers bopping hard in all directions. He struck a pose, one arm pointed up while he knelt on one knee and flexed the other arm, shining in the waning summer sunlight. “Silicon Crackler, armed bomb robot supercomputer from the future!”

Their uncles and Tavros cheered, while Karkat sat chewing his nails. 

“You’re, uh, you’re going south, Montana!” Sollux declared. 

“You’re thinking of the Dakotas, dummy!” Aradia giggled, taking her bungee-whip in both hands as they squared off. Clubs called into the ring from his seat in the shade. 

“Okey, we want a good clean fight. First to a pin wins, but only face up and you have to hold it through a three count, okey?”

“Yup!” 

“Sure!”

“And I don’t want to see nobody face down, you hear?” Hearts added in, putting the hose down to keep the water level in the pool from getting deep enough for anyone to choke. “If someone falls you help ‘em up and we only pin on our backs, right?”

“You got it Uncle Hearts!”

“Yeah, no drowning today!”

“That’s good kids.” Hearts nodded, letting the hose leak into the ground next to his seat. Club cheersed the open air and called to the combatants.

“Let’s have it! Fight!”

The two cousins started to circle one another in the ankle deep water, Aradia sizing Sollux up while he tried to stay steady on the bouncy pool floor. He swayed back and forth, keeping his feet wide apart and his knees bent, and held both his foiled arms up, waving them at right angles all around and glaring sunlight across the water in the ring. 

“You’re no match for my solar-beams, Montana!” Sollux saw an opening and threw a glinting punch right over Aradia’s head. She took it, letting out a mock pained ‘awh!’ and turning with the fake impact of the punch. 

“Crackler’s coming in hot, sending sparks flying around the ring!” Hearts practiced his best announcer’s voice, enunciating and nodding to Clubs. 

“Montana holds her own, coming in with a big left hook--” Aradia swiped Sollux’s headband and mimicked punching it off his head. She threw it across the ring and both Hearts and Clubs let out shouts. Clubs picked up his narration again. “I don’t believe it! Montana sends Crackler’s signature deely boppers flying.”

“They’re bombs!” Sollux said, ducking another swipe. “So they’d explode when you threw them!” 

“Oh noo!” Aradia looked over her shoulder to where the headband was floating and then put her arms out and leapt away, belly flopping to safety. Sollux made two long hissing explosion noises and kicked water after her to sell it. He saw her getting up on one knee and went on the attack, kicking off of one uncertain foot to tackle her back to the mat. They collided and splashed into the water in a wave. 

“Montana narrowly avoids a blast from Crackler, only to go down with a blow in the body!” Hearts sat up to be sure they were both above water, then settled back and nodded to Clubs that they were fine. “They’re locked in it now, both fighters pushing for a lead and neither giving an inch.”

They were hanging onto each other’s arms, rolling in the water taking turns splashing it in each other’s faces and laughing. Karkat jumped up and shouted from the side of the ring. 

“Pin her Silicon! You got her down, just pin her!” 

His uncles grinned behind him and Sollux snapped to. He let go of one of her arms and threw his elbow down to the mat beside her belly. Aradia bounced onto her back and held her tummy, groaning and kicking her legs in mock pain. Sollux fell across her, his arms out around his head while his belly landing over hers. He made sure to keep his chin up. 

Clubs started to count only to be out-shouted by Karkat, who slapped the plastic side of the pool repeatedly. 

“One! Two! Thr--”  
“Kick out!” Hearts roared as Aradia kicked up with both legs, pushing herself up into a sitting position and throwing Sollux off of her with a splash. She bounced to her feet and found him on his belly, fumbling for his glasses. 

“Oh, I got ‘em,” She fished them out of the water and held them up where Sollux could see them. He wobbled up and she extended a hand to get him to his feet, then broke away and dangled the glasses out of his reach. 

“This is insane!” Clubs picked up the narration, stepping out of his seat to the edge of the ring. He put his hand out just as Aradia reached the edge, and she handed him the glasses. “Montana has blinded Crackler, what will the future bomb robot do?!”

“This is one of the most illegal moves I’ve ever seen,” Hearts mused, as Sollux squinted across the ring and squared up, rubbing his foiled arms to keep the tape on nice and tight. “Where is the ref?!” 

“Where is he ever,” Clubs broke character with a sly smile and they clinked their beers together.

“We’re seeing the debut of a true villain here this afternoon, folks!” Hearts picked up as the kids circled each other again. “How will Silicon Crackler win against the thief who stole his sight?”

“C’mon, Sollux, you can do it,” Karkat gripped the side of the ring, eyes wide. 

“Give me your best shot, Silicon,” Aradia was grinning like a mad woman while Sollux rolled his silver shoulders and slapped his face. He started poking at his cheeks like he was dialing on a phone, ‘boop’ing and ‘beep’ing with every poke.

“It looks like Silicon is dialing in his finishing move, giving this fight all he’s got!” Clubs watched his son with a grin, clutching his glasses safely in one hand. “This could be it folks!”

“You’re about to witness my most powerful move!” Sollux took his wide stance again, gleaming his arms around in a circle and then throwing his hands up to draw energy from the sun. “Get ready to feel the wrath of my future bomb robot supercomputer Super Explosion!” 

He sprang forward, jumping as high as he could and throwing himself at Aradia, who tried to duck ahead of a giant splash that sloshed all across the ring. Sollux, Tavros, Hearts and Clubs all yelled out: “Explosion!”

“The dust settles in the ring,” Hearts spoke low, watching Karkat tugging on his hair while Clubs leaned up to see what had become of the two fighters. “Was Silicon’s final move enough?”

They saw Sollux laying clutching Aradia’s hat, falling for a feint while Aradia had escaped the blast, several feet away from her washed up cousin. Sollux lay on his back, ‘beep’ing and ‘boop’ing sadly. 

“I don’t believe it! Montana dove out of the way just in time! She only lost her hat!” 

Aradia scrambled to her feet, jogging over to her cousin and quietly said. 

“You okey? You’re gonna be out if you don’t get up.”   
“Yeah, I’m fine, I had my fun.” Sollux nodded up to her. She didn’t need any more reassurance, instead she jumped up and brought her elbow down a foot from his head. 

“Montana elbow slams poor Silicon, pins him while his batteries are dead--” Clubs kept announcing, counting along with Karkat who called out each number with growing dread. “One! Two! Three! It’s over! Auburn Montana has taken the first round of the Super Summer Slam Splashdown Showdown!”

Aradia jumped up, punching the air and dancing around, kicking her legs up and sending waves around the pool. One hit Sollux in the face and he coughed, then stuck his arm up and grabbed at her wet polo. 

“Hey, a little help?”

“Oh, yeah, sorry.” She pulled him up by his arm and walked him to the edge of the ring, where Clubs handed over his glasses. 

“That was a pretty dirty trick, Aradia,” Sollux said, peering through his glasses after mopping at them with his shirt. “You make a great heel.” 

“I know, right?” She said, bouncing excitedly while she hung onto the noodles on the side of the ring. Sollux handed her the soaked, brown hat and she put it on, drawing it low over her face again and turning to point at Tavros. “Now I just have to take out Tavrio Nobell and I’ll be Queen Champion of the Super Summer Slam Splashdown Showdown! And you’ll all have to watch Temple of Doom all week!”

“Oh no, that movie’s scary!” Tavros climbed into the ring, his freckled face knotted with concern. “Auburn, can’t we just watch the first one?”

“No!” She stood across from him, arms akimbo. “Temple of Doom is the best one, so no being squeamish!”

“Tavrio Nobell apparates into the ring, his cloak flowing behind him,” Hearts gave his son a little intro, and Tavros grabbed the edge of his shower curtain cape and swung it this way and that, slicing the water on either side of him. “Hey, wait a second-- Tavros no jewelry in the ring, kiddo.”

“Aww, but Pop! It’s part of my character,” Tavros covered his nose with his hand, not wanting to fight without his nose ring. “C’mon, it’s just a clip-on, can’t I wear it?”

“No, not even if it’s a clip-on.” Hearts got up and came over to retrieve the nose ring from his son. “You’ll thank me when the dastardly Montana doesn’t make you eat that thing, alright?”

“Fine, I guess,” Tavros took off his nose ring and handed it to his father, who pocketed it and then ruffled his hair. 

“Good, now knock her dead, kiddo.” He squeezed either one of Tavros’s shoulders, emitting a series of plasticky squeaks from the shower curtain Tavros wore.

The kids turned back to one another.

“My name’s Tavrio Nobell!” Tavros clutched his cape and twirled in the water, sending a splash at Aradia. He grabbed the hunk of metal holding his ‘championship’ belt around his waist and pointed dramatically at his cousin. “I’m the sworn protector of this belt, and in the name of all that’s good in wrestling me and my magic dice-chucks will defeat you, Auburn Montana!” 

Tavros grabbed his dice from where they’d been dangling around his neck and spun them over his head, then paused and checked in with his cousin. 

“You’re ready to fight, right? Because you just fought and if you wanted to take a break that’s fine.”

“Bring it, Nobell!” Aradia flexed both her scrawny arms and kicked water at him “I’m gonna ring your friggin’ bell and then I’m gonna take that belt and be the Evil Queen of the Summer Slam!” 

“Booo!” Karkat called from the sidelines, sweating and slapping the ring. “Boo! Say no to evil! Boo! Hiss!” 

“No one will get to boo once I’m crowned the champion! Silence!” Aradia kicked a wave at Karkat, then ran to the side of the ring so she and Tavros could face off. Karkat mopped at his face and spat, rubbing his head and grumbling. 

“You okay, kiddo?” Hearts asked, seeing him more disgruntled than he’d been all day. 

“I just don’t want her to win,” Karkat fussed with his hair, his face steadily reddening. “Temple of Doom is so intense and Indy hates his dad like the whole time and it’s gonna suck watching that over and over! I don’t even know why she likes that movie!”

“Actually the one with his dad is The Lost Crusade,” Clubs corrected him. 

“Yeah, and we’ll watch that one after!” Aradia called out. 

“Nooo! C’mon Aradia!” Karkat looked aghast at his sister, who stuck her tongue out and pulled down one of her eyelids at him. 

“You don’t get to complain if you’re not even gonna challenge me!” She told him. 

“Enough talk!” Tavros put his hands up and got into character, flexing back and forth from one lunging pose to another as he spoke. “Let’s do this! Good versus evil! One fight to rule them all! All the marbles in one shot! I roll my dice and your fate is sealed, Auburn Montana! My opening move will be--!”

He threw the soaking wet, fuzzy dice through the air and they landed with a plash. Everyone craned their necks to see the dice, then the whole backyard fell apart.

“Snake eyes!” Clubs called out, while Hearts let out an anguished yell that overpowered his son’s anguished cry. 

“Nooo!” Tavros fell to his knees in the water and Aradia bounced up and down, pointing at him. 

“Ha! Eat that!” She said, then cocked her head. “Wait, what’s snake eyes mean for wrestling?”

“Uh, well,” Tavros pushed a hand through his wet hair. “Rolling ones is never good, and rolling two ones is even worse so, y’know, I guess I did pretty bad? So you get to attack this round.”

“Okey, got it.” Aradia crossed to him and started laying in a round of big, no-impact punches and a no-touch knee to the chin. Tavros put up his hands and cried out in pain, splashing onto his back and rolling around to avoid her next round of attacks. 

“That’s it, I gotta do something--” Karkat broke away from the ring and all but jumped head first into the box of riff raff from the basement. 

“Montana’s laying in a savage attack on Nobell, not letting up for a minute!” Hearts exclaimed as she pushed both hands through the water and sent a wave over Tavros as he rolled on the floor of the pool. Tavros took the brunt of it and staggered soggily to his feet, putting his dukes up. “Nobell rises from the ashes, ready to take Montana down!”

Tavros and Aradia were both huffing, circling slowly in the ring with the fuzzy dice between them. 

“It was just a bad throw, my luck is gonna turn, Montana.” Tavros said, shuffling closer and closer to his dice. 

“That’s what you think,” Aradia took her whip in both hands, stretching the bungee cord menacingly. “But you need to get the dice to throw them.” 

Tavros gulped but braced himself, then leaned back and sprang forward, diving for his dice. Aradia took either end of her whip and tried to rope it around Tavros, just missing him as he skidded through the water. 

“Oooh! I don’t believe it!” Clubs called out. “Montana misses her shot and Nobell snatches back his dice.”

“Haha! It’s over now!” Tavros swung the dice over his head hard, sprinkling all around him before he let them go in a big throw. The dice sailed through the air, going clean overhead out of the ring and into the far corner of the backyard. 

“Oh no and it’s a miss by Nobell!”

“Pop! What’d they land on?” Tavros called to his father. Hearts craned his neck. 

“Looks like a two and a one?”

“Nooo!” Tavros sank into the water again and Aradia came up and looped her whip around his chest, twisting the cord together behind his back in lieu of a knot. She pushed him over lightly and put her foot on his belly, posing over him. 

“One!” Tavros tossed and turned, mock fighting the whip, while Aradia turned her foot so his squirming kept him from turning into the water. “Two!”

“No no, it’s just bad luck!” Tavros told the sky and his cousin and the adoring public around the ring. 

“Three! That’s it! Auburn Montana has won the Super Summer Slam Splashdown Showdown Championship!”

Aradia pulled Tavros up and untwisted him, bouncing up and down gleefully. 

“Good fight,” Tavros said, shaking her hand while she punched the air with her other fist. “I guess you’re going to be a pretty good Evil Queen, Aradia.”

“Yes! Yes! Yes! I won! I’m the greatest wrestler of all time!” Aradia danced around in a circle while Tavros pulled off his father’s belt and then gave it to her. She pulled it on and fastened it as he climbed out of the ring. “I’m the Queen! I’m the Champ! You all have to bow down to me!”

“Not so fast!”

There was a gasp from the sidelines as Karkat emerged from the box of old junk, wearing one of Slick’s old eyepatches and a worn out vest. He hurried across the yard and dove in between the pool noodles, bouncing up into the ring and balling his fists. 

“I challenge you, Auburn Montana-- your reign of terror ends now!” Karkat wobbled then found his footing and pointed at his sister. “My name’s Scarred Slayer and I’m here to end you!”

Aradia squinted at her brother, twirling the end of her whip while the crowd outside the ring gathered in close. 

“Well you’re not on the official roster,” she spoke slowly, while Karkat sweated and pulled the eyepatch down so it hung around his neck. Dress up was fun and all but he didn’t want to fight her without both eyes. “And you only challenged me after I won so I don’t know…” 

“Yeah? What’re you, scared?” Karkat pinned his arms at his sides and started clucking like a chicken. Aradia’s mouth fell open and she moved back into a fighter’s crouch. 

“What the hell is going on out here?” Slick and Droog came down the back porch, having found no one inside the duplex. Slick carried a plastic bag and Droog leered at Aradia’s hair and the soaked mess that was all the children. 

“Aradia what happened to your skirt? And your braid?” He asked, turning his stare on Hearts. 

“Papa I’m not Aradia!” She huffed and her shoulders went slack, her whip falling into the pool. “I’m Auburn Montana! I’m the Evil Queen of Thieves!”

“What?” Droog was totally lost as he and Slick came up to the ring. “What are you saying? What is happening? You made them wrestle, Hearts?”

“Oh hush, it was just at the big finale,” Hearts waved a hand at the two of them. Clubs fished in the cooler and threw a beer to Slick, who looked up just in time to catch it. Droog didn’t drink beer so he was left to wonder what was going on without any help. “You two just sit tight, we’re about to see who the Super Summer Slam Splashdown Showdown Champion is.”

“ _ What? _ ”

“Shhh!” A chorus came from the audience and Karkat looked back at his dads. Slick returned his gaze, finding his son wearing his old eyepatch and vest, and immediately picked up the vibe. He threw his fist up and rustled his bag as he called to his boy. 

“Kick some ass, Karkat!”

The fighters turned back to each other, Aradia holding her whip while Karkat balled and flexed his hands over and over. 

“Alright,” Hearts announced. “One more good clean fight for the title. You kids ready?”

“Ready.” Aradia said fiercely.

“Ready.” Karkat matched her, step for step as they began to circle. 

“Fight!”

Aradia lashed out with her whip, cracking it into the water while Karkat swung one way and then the other to avoid it. She snarled and kicked up a wave to distract him, then dove in and body slammed them to the floor. Getting both arms around her brother, she bodied him down and they struggled harder than the other fights against one another. Karkat pushed on her face but she wouldn’t come off. He wiggled hard and kicked out, breaking free and staggering away from her. 

“C’mon, Slayer,” Aradia swung her hair back out of her face, an arch of water shining behind her. “Let’s see you fight, or are  _ you  _ the chicken?!”

“I’m not chicken,” Karkat got his footing and balled his fists. “I’m gonna stop you, I’m gonna fight for what’s right!” 

He launched forward and threw a big punch passed her cheek, which Aradia played up with a grin. 

“Awuh! Oh ow!” She held her face and staggered back, then ducked one punch only to be sent back by an uppercut. Aradia bounced to the floor and struggled up, tired from her other fights but still playing it up. 

“Hearts what is happening?” Droog knew enough to see his daughter wasn’t in any danger but he’d never understood why wrestling was like this. Hearts shushed him while Slick beat on the edge of the pool. 

“That’s my boy! Lay beats and fill seats, Karkat! Wipe the smug off her mug!”

Karkat was breathing heavily, watching his sister climbing to her feet again. She came at him with the whip, snapping it across his chest and then kicking him onto his ass. He landed with a splash and the smack of the water and rubber against his ears stunned him for a moment. Aradia kept her foot in place on his chest and looked down at her brother, frowning as the count came up from the edge of the ring. 

“One! Two! Three--!” Karkat rolled hard and sprang back up, gasping for breath and coming to his senses slowly. Aradia smiled again, cracking her whip in the water at his feet and splashing his face lightly. 

“I knew you wouldn’t go down that easy. Thanks for proving me right.” 

“That’s my girl,” Slick said through grinding teeth, his eye wide. “That’s my girl, that’s my boy! My kids!”

“See? Slick gets it. So what’s your excuse?” Clubs needled Droog, who hunched at the side of ring in disdainful confusion. 

“Am I still in?” Karkat asked his sister, who nodded and splashed him with her whip again. 

“You wiggled out just in time.” She told him. And with that she charged forward, holding the whip high. Karkat ducked to avoid it, only for her free hand to grab his shirt and throw him back to the floor. He landed with a cold smack and she stepped in close to pin him. 

Water rushed into Karkat’s ears but he could still see his dad slapping the side of the pool and cheering. He looked and saw Aradia bearing down on him and in a whirl Karkat swung his body around, his legs tangling with hers and sweeping her down flat in the pool. She hit the water with a tidal wave and a shout from the sidelines, and Karkat jumped over and belly flopped across her, pinning her down as Aradia let out a heavy breath and let the water lap at her face. 

“One!” 

“Good fight,” she said, patting his back as the count came up from their uncles. “Did you finally have fun?”

“Two!”

“Yeah,” Karkat huffed, out of breath and boggling at the fact that Aradia had faced three of these fights back to back to back. “Yeah I had a lot of fun. Thanks, Aradia.”

“Three! It’s over! The Evil Queen is defeated! Scarred Slayer wins!”

The crowd of soaked kids and their fathers went wild, Slick hammered on the side of the pool and Droog took the bag from him so he wouldn’t get his purchase wet. Karkat dragged his wet self up from the pool and helped his sister up, then wrapped her in a big hug and squeezed hard. She rubbed his back and then peeled them apart. 

“I get it, I’m the best, you don’t have to be so sappy.” She said, putting her arm around him as they walked to the edge of the ring. 

They climbed down and Slick got his sinewy arms around them both. 

“You two were fucking great!” He said, color rising in his face seeing what great fighters his kids were. Aradia laughed and wriggled out of the hug, leaving Karkat with their dad while she went and dampen Droog’s pantlegs. Slick hung onto Karkat for a moment then let go, grabbing for the bag he wasn’t holding and looking over at his husband. 

“Ugh, Aradia, you’re getting me all wet.” Droog said, petting his daughter’s cloud of hair. 

“You should watch wrestling with us,” She said, hugging him despite his complaining and slowly soaking more of him. “It’s the coolest thing ever, you’d love it Papa.”

“I sincerely doubt that.” Droog droned. Slick stepped up to him and snatched back the shopping bag, then came back to his son. 

“Uh, Karkat, I got something I need to tell you.” He said, holding the bag behind him and trying to remember exactly how he had phrased it on his desk in class. 

“Yeah?” Now that the fight was over Karkat was back to muttering at the ground and kicking the grass. He turned his dripping face up to his dad, not sure what he was about to say. “What is it, Dad?”

“Y’know I, uh, I was a real dick yesterday and uh, it wasn’t right to break your Gameboy--”

“It was my DS.” Karkat corrected him. 

“Right, so your expensive Gameboy. So I went out and I got you a new one.” Slick reached into the bag and pulled out the brand new 3DS, in limited edition bright red. “I wanted to make you whole again and uh, tell you I love you and uhm… I’m real sorry, kiddo. I won’t ever do something that stupid again.”

Karkat took the box in his wet hands, looking at the glossy photo on the front. He was beet red now, his wet hair sticking out in all directions and dripping on the box. With a loud sniff he fell forward and wrapped his dad in a hug, smearing his nose across Slick’s shirt. 

“I love you too Dad-- Thank you!” They squeezed each other tight, Karkat giggling through tears that got Slick started too. He rubbed his good eye until it was an angry red but he couldn’t keep a few tears back. 

Aradia leaned against Droog, watching her dad and brother make up, and tugged on his jacket. 

“How was class?” She asked. Droog showed her their certificates and Hearts and Clubs gave them a round of applause.

“Look at that, you boys managed to pull through huh? And nobody got hurt?” Clubs asked. 

“No,” Droog stuffed the certificates back in his suit jacket. “Unfortunately no one was hurt.”

“Pretty good day all around, huh?” Hearts asked the kids, who cheered. 

“Yeah, it was the best!” Tavros said, sporting his nose ring and swinging his cape around. 

“We should start wrestling every week like this,” Sollux lisped, his foil flaking off of him. Hearts hummed happily at the idea, then reached out with his beer can and toasted it against Clubs’s. 

“To Tall Boys and Hard Boys,” He said.

“Tall Boys and Hard Boys,” Clubs nodded. “Salut!” 

“Salut!”


End file.
